Not so noob questionz... on compositing

I used to work with NUKE but now i’m on a small project (means no budget) and i want to use Blender for all my compositing tasks and i will need lots of help (mostly: HOW DO I DO THAT!!) for different tasks that i used to do in nuke, understand that the switch from nuke to blender is a challenge but i think i can manage it.

Here are the main technique i plan to use
2D & 3D tracking
Camera projection: to clean plates
Masks, roto, 2D & 3D
Deal with different lookup tables ( different source material. Live footage. No 3D! )
Color grading
Optimisation in the pipeline as the footage is HD & up (4k) 16bits .tiff
PAINT!!! i love to retouch by painting as it is faster & more precise on small or fast moving parts. IS there a way to paint directly in Blender??

Ze questionz:
As for now, i have done some tracks (works great) & i’m exploring the masks, i found how to link point to trackers but i want the whole mask (layer?) to follow the track, then adjust individual points. How do i attach it?

I saw lots of good thing on Cycle, does it is helpfull in the compositor as it use the GPU? If so. how do i set it up because now it is pretty slow and seem to calculate everything in a 3D space.

Dan!

I saw lots of good thing on Cycle, does it is helpfull in the compositor as it use the GPU? If so. how do i set it up because now it is pretty slow and seem to calculate everything in a 3D space.
Cycles is a renderer, nothing to do with the compositor. It uses CUDA for gpu rendering, the compositor already uses OpenCL for gpu acceleration on selected node types http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.64/Compositing_Nodes#OpenCL

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Thread moved from Blender Discussion to Support / Compositing and Post Processing forum

Bear in mind that there are many missing tools in the compositor compared to an app like Nuke. Of course there are work arounds but your project might be realised easier with Adobe cloud products like After Effects?

If you are prepeared for a lot of DIY work the go for it with Blender and ask lots of questions. There are many people to ask here and on twitter - hash tag #b3d - and at http://blender.stackexchange.com/ where you crowd source from professional users.

2D & 3D tracking - possible and works well but not as full featured as pro trackers

Camera projection: to clean plates - very capable and lots of tuts around

Masks, roto, 2D & 3D - very capable, new roto tools make this easier but some areas lacking (access to masks in compositor etc)

Deal with different lookup tables - new color handling is good but haven’t tried out LUTs don’t think you can import any?

Color grading - very good

Optimisation in the pipeline as the footage is HD & up (4k) 16bits .tiff - image sequences are the recommended workflow, but proxies aren’t integrated in compositor yet.

PAINT!!! - simple painting on images only at this time, not sure about painting over image sequence, don’t think you can.

So??? How do i attach or parent a mask or mask layer to a specific track?

Is there a real roto tutorial sowhere that covel all those tasks?

Check out the last open movie blog entry for masking. http://mango.blender.org/production/masking-in-blender/
And this recent development with the plane tracker. http://vimeo.com/71727578
And this is the mask version, it’s a bit more elaborate http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vISEwqNHqe4&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DvISEwqNHqe4

WOW !!! Thanks for the links!
realy nice roto tools there.