Matches an editorial retime to its plate inside Nuke and rebuilds it as a TimeWarp, from the picture alone or with the edit's burned-in timecode.
No More Manual Retime - auto retime matching for Nuke
First submitted: 2 November 2026
Author: Jumin Park
Website: https://github.com/vfx-compositor/no-more-manual-retime
Compatible Nuke versions: 15.1 or later
Compatibility: Source
Matching a plate to an offline edit that was sped up, ramped, held, reversed or reframed usually means stepping through frames by hand. No More Manual Retime compares the edit with the plate and writes the result as ordinary Nuke nodes: a TimeWarp keyed by plate frame, FrameRange, Reformat, a Transform for scale/shift/flop, and a QC difference branch.
Features
- Image-only matching, or image + burn-in timecode reading (digit reader built in)
- Constant speed, ramps, holds, reverse, fixed scale/reposition
- Batch: several shots in one run
- Path templates: finds plates and edits from your own folder layout
- QC review: one movie (or JPEG sequence) of every result, with an optional look match to make the difference easier to read
- Warnings for suspected cuts and stretches it cannot tell apart
Accuracy (16 shots not used in development, 144 edit conditions, failures included)
- General retime: 97.35% exact frames image-only, 99.87% with burn-in TC
- Reframe: 92.59% image-only, 99.80% with burn-in TC
Real Nuke thumbnail caches replayed on CPU, not GUI renders. The burn-in timecode was generated for the test, not read from real footage. Low-motion and dark shots are the weakest.
Known limits
- Interpolated slow motion (optical flow / frame blend) is still weak
- Rotation is not searched; scale search covers 0.8–1.6×
- In OCIO or ACES projects, set the colorspace on both edit and plate Reads
- Always check the QC difference
Requirements: Nuke 15.1 or later with GUI, numpy (the tool guides installation if missing). Verified on macOS with Nuke 16.1; Nuke 15.1, Windows and Linux are not yet verified.
Install: paste the single .py file into the Script Editor and run, or add it to your menu.py.
Privacy: everything runs locally inside Nuke. Nothing is uploaded.
MIT License. See LICENSE in the download
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