I still use compound and it is amazing but what is it doing? How do I replicate that in Nuke?
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Yeah. Thanks for the response.
How come it doesn’t additive get brighter. How does it combine those frames.
I love it but can’t get the Nuke team to recreate because I don’t understand.
Sorry, dumb joke. Just one example of the manual being… less than illuminating.
I didn’t realize how little I understood compound until I was talking it up to someone a few weeks ago, and that’s after using it for 20 years.
If you do figure it out, please report back!
Adding… I suspect it’s some kind of temporal averaging. If I were near a box I would try average+timewarp and compare the result. Alas.
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Oh yeah. Durrh!
Average over 20 looks just like compound over 20. Now you made me feel stoopid.
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Whew! It was a lucky guess! Possibly fueled by beer.
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I use it constantly for clean frames. I replicated it in Nuke once without knowing about average. Let’s say you want to go over 10 frames, you add them together and then divide by 10. I forget if it was a math operator or just in the grade node.
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so what is Compound? I’ve never used it, but now you have me intrigued!
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So it blends any number of frames, user editable, into a single frame. So if you can stabilise a shot or the shot is static it combines a number of frames and all of the grain/noise blends together and cancels its self out.
A lot like average (apparently) or recursive ops.
Unlike average or recursive ops you don’t need a run up on the sequence to get the blend. It sort of looks ahead and will blend all of the x number of frames for you.
If you compound over 5 frames your clip will contain one fifth of the frames and those frames will be a combination of 5 frames each.
Give it a try.
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Thanks…vaguely remember a similar tool in Shake 15 yrs ago!
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Definitely use it. For clean plate work it’s indispensable. Essentially it’s a uniform temporal average of the number of frames entered in the box. Other than used as a degrain for creating clean plates, use it for averaging out any changes in quality to a stabbed or locked off image—especially useful when you planar unwrap.
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In Nuke the closest to Compound is FrameBlend with startframe and endframe set. Without it it takes a numframes and then it works like an Average (i.e. it has a midpoint with falloff, and the midpoint will be your falloff).
I use Compound (and FrameBlend in fixed start/end mode) all the time 
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Temporal median node in nuke does this. (never used compound though)