Natron is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

node-based

compositing Compositing is the process or technique of combining visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. Live action, Live-action shooting for compositing is ...

application. It has been influenced by

digital compositing Digital compositing is the process of digitally assembling multiple images to make a final image, typically for print, motion pictures or screen display. It is the digital analogue of optical film compositing. Mathematics The basic operation us ...

software such as Avid Media Illusion,

Apple Shake Shake is a discontinued image compositing package used in the post-production industry developed by Nothing Real for Windows and later acquired by Apple Inc. Shake was widely used in visual effects and digital compositing for film, video and comm ...

Blackmagic Fusion Blackmagic Fusion (formerly eyeon Fusion and briefly Maya Fusion, a version produced for Alias-Wavefront) is post-production image compositing developed by Blackmagic Design and originally authored by eyeon Software. It is typically used to crea ...

, Autodesk Flame and Nuke, from which its user interface and many of its concepts are derived. Natron supports plugins following the OpenFX 1.4 API. Most open-source and commercial OpenFX plug-ins are supported.

Origin of the name

Natron is named after

Lake Natron Lake Natron is a salt or alkaline lake located in north Ngorongoro District of Arusha Region in Tanzania. It is in the Gregory Rift, which is the eastern branch of the East African Rift. The lake is within the Lake Natron Basin, a Ramsar Si ...

Tanzania Tanzania (; ), officially the United Republic of Tanzania ( sw, Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It borders Uganda to the north; Kenya to the northeast; Comoro Islands ...

which, according to Natron

lead programmer In software development, a lead programmer is responsible for providing technical guidance and mentorship to a team of software developers. Alternative titles include ''development lead'', ''technical lead'', ''lead programmer'', or ''lead applicat ...

Alexandre Gauthier, provides "natural visual effects" by preserving its dead animals.

History

Natron was started by Alexandre Gauthier in June of 2012 as a personal project. The project was the winner of the 2013 ''Boost Your Code'' contest by

Inria The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name ''Institut de recherche en informatiq ...

. The prize was a 12-month

employment contract An employment contract or contract of employment is a kind of contract used in labour law to attribute rights and responsibilities between parties to a bargain. The contract is between an "employee" and an "employer". It has arisen out of the old ...

to develop Natron as a

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

within the institute. The first widely available public release was 0.92 (June 6th, 2014), which brought

rotoscoping Rotoscoping is an animation technique that animators use to trace over motion picture footage, frame by frame, to produce realistic action. Originally, animators projected photographed live-action movie images onto a glass panel and traced o ...

and

chroma key Chroma key compositing, or chroma keying, is a visual-effects and post-production technique for compositing (layering) two images or video streams together based on colour hues ( chroma range). The technique has been used in many fields to ...

ing functionalities. Subsequent beta releases brought additional features such as

motion blur Motion blur is the apparent streaking of moving objects in a photograph or a sequence of frames, such as a film or animation. It results when the image being recorded changes during the recording of a single exposure, due to rapid movement or lo ...

color management In digital imaging systems, color management (or colour management) is the controlled conversion between the color representations of various devices, such as image scanners, digital cameras, monitors, TV screens, film printers, computer printer ...

throug
OpenColorIO
and

video tracking Video tracking is the process of locating a moving object (or multiple objects) over time using a camera. It has a variety of uses, some of which are: human-computer interaction, security and surveillance, video communication and compression, au ...

. Version 1.0 was released on December 22nd, 2014, together with a large sample project by François "CoyHot" Grassard, a professional

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...

artist and teacher, demonstrating that Natron could execute interactively graphs with more than 100 nodes. In January 2015, the Art and Technology of Image (ATI) department in

Paris 8 University Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis (french: Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis) is a public university in Paris, France. Once part of the historic University of Paris, it is now an autonomous public institution. It is one of the th ...

announced that they would switch to professional-quality

for teaching

to students and artists, including

Blender A blender (sometimes called a mixer or liquidiser in British English) is a kitchen appliance, kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, crush, purée or emulsion, emulsify food and other substances. A stationary blender consists of a blender ...

Krita Krita ( ) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital art and 2D animation. The software runs on Windows, macOS, Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on th ...

and Natron.

Licensing

Before version 2.0, Natron was licensed under the

Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns ...

version 2.0, which allowed redistributing it with

closed-source Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and inte ...

plug-ins. Since version 2.0, the software was relicensed under the

GNU General Public License version 2 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

or later to allow better commercialization. All plugins that are distributed with binaries of Natron 2.0 or later have thus to be

compatible Compatibility may refer to: Computing * Backward compatibility, in which newer devices can understand data generated by older devices * Compatibility card, an expansion card for hardware emulation of another device * Compatibility layer, compo ...

with the

GPLv2 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

Closed-source Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and inte ...

plug-ins, including commercial ones, can still be used with Natron, although the GPL according to the FSF does not allow loading and linking

plug-ins, or plug-ins that are not distributed under a GPL compatible license, but they have to be distributed separately. Data produced by Natron, or any software distributed under the GPL, is not covered by the GPL: the copyright on the output of a program belongs to the user of that program.

Features

Hardware

* Low hardware requirements: a 64 bits processor, at least 3GB of RAM (8GB recommended) * A graphic card that supports

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...

2.0 or OpenGL 1.5 with a few commonly available extensions
ARB_texture_non_power_of_twoARB_shader_objectsARB_vertex_buffer_objectARB_pixel_buffer_object
.

Render engine

* 32 bits floating point linear color processing pipeline : all frames are represented as floating-point

RGBA RGBA stands for red green blue alpha. While it is sometimes described as a color space, it is actually a three-channel RGB color model supplemented with a fourth ''alpha channel''. Alpha indicates how opaque each pixel is and allows an image to ...

samples with premultiplied alpha, permitting the use of

alpha compositing In computer graphics, alpha compositing or alpha blending is the process of combining one image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render picture elements (pixels) in separate pas ...

operators defined by Thomas Porter and

Tom Duff Tom or TOM may refer to: * Tom (given name), a diminutive of Thomas or Tomás or an independent Aramaic given name (and a list of people with the name) Characters * Tom Anderson, a character in ''Beavis and Butt-Head'' * Tom Beck, a character ...

. * Support for multi-core architectures: all processing is multithreaded using a

thread pool pattern In computer programming, a thread pool is a software design pattern for achieving concurrency of execution in a computer program. Often also called a replicated workers or worker-crew model, a thread pool maintains multiple threads waiting for ...

. *

Color management In digital imaging systems, color management (or colour management) is the controlled conversion between the color representations of various devices, such as image scanners, digital cameras, monitors, TV screens, film printers, computer printer ...

is handled by th
OpenColorIO
library, including support for the ACES color encoding system proposed by the

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, often pronounced ; also known as simply the Academy or the Motion Picture Academy) is a professional honorary organization with the stated goal of advancing the arts and sciences of motio ...

. * Support for many image formats, using OpenImageIO, including multi-layer

OpenEXR OpenEXR is a high-dynamic range, multi-channel raster file format, released as an open standard along with a set of software tools created by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), under a free software license similar to the BSD license. It is notabl ...

. Additional image layers can be used to store several color layers, or for non-color information such as depth,

optical flow Optical flow or optic flow is the pattern of apparent motion of objects, surfaces, and edges in a visual scene caused by the relative motion between an observer and a scene. Optical flow can also be defined as the distribution of apparent veloci ...

binocular disparity Binocular disparity refers to the difference in image location of an object seen by the left and right human eye, eyes, resulting from the eyes’ horizontal separation (parallax). The brain uses binocular disparity to extract depth information from ...

, or masks. * Support for reading and writing video files through the

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...

library, including

digital intermediate Digital intermediate (typically abbreviated DI) is a motion picture finishing process which classically involves digitizing a motion picture and manipulating the color and other image characteristics. Definition and overview A digital intermediat ...

formats such as DNxHD and

Apple ProRes Apple ProRes is a high quality, "visually lossless" lossy video compression format developed by Apple Inc. for use in post-production that supports video resolution up to 8K. It is the successor of the Apple Intermediate Codec and was introduced ...

. * Full support of the OpenFX 1.4 API, enabling use of

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

commercial Commercial may refer to: * a dose of advertising conveyed through media (such as - for example - radio or television) ** Radio advertisement ** Television advertisement * (adjective for:) commerce, a system of voluntary exchange of products and s ...

plug-ins. * Support for low-resolution rendering for previewing the output of computing-intensive visual effects.

Tools

* Image transform (position, rotation, scale, skew). *

Video tracking Video tracking is the process of locating a moving object (or multiple objects) over time using a camera. It has a variety of uses, some of which are: human-computer interaction, security and surveillance, video communication and compression, aug ...

functionalities. * Keying: Keyer, Chroma Keyer, Difference Keyer, Hue Keyer, PIK Keyer. * Paint: Solid, Pencil, Eraser, Clone, Reveal, Blur, Smear, Dodge, Burn. * Manual

, using

Bézier curve A Bézier curve ( ) is a parametric curve used in computer graphics and related fields. A set of discrete "control points" defines a smooth, continuous curve by means of a formula. Usually the curve is intended to approximate a real-world shape t ...

s. * A wide range of additional effects (color transforms, geometric transforms, image generators...) are available. *

Key frame In animation and filmmaking, a key frame (or keyframe) is a drawing or shot that defines the starting and ending points of a smooth transition. These are called ''frames'' because their position in time is measured in frames on a strip of film ...

-based parameter animation, using

Bernstein polynomial In the mathematical field of numerical analysis, a Bernstein polynomial is a polynomial that is a linear combination of Bernstein basis polynomials. The idea is named after Sergei Natanovich Bernstein. A numerically stable way to evaluate polyn ...

s (the polynomial basis behind

s) for interpolation. * Animation curves editing : Curve Editor. * Keyframes editing : Dope Sheet. * Support for

stereoscopic 3D Stereoscopy (also called stereoscopics, or stereo imaging) is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. The word ''stereoscopy'' derives . Any stereoscopic image is ...

and multi-view processing.

Advanced

* Support for batch-mode rendering through a command-line tool, allowing the final render to be processed on a

render farm A render farm is a high-performance computer system, e.g. a computer cluster, built to render computer-generated imagery (CGI), typically for film and television visual effects. Origin of the term The term ''render farm'' was born during the ...

. * A project format written in

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

and easily human editable. * Node presets can be imported/exported easily via XML. *

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

script language (Python 2.7).
SeExpr
script language (Walt Disney Animation Studios). *

WebGL WebGL (Short for Web Graphics Library) is a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 2D and 3D graphics within any compatible web browser without the use of plug-ins. WebGL is fully integrated with other web standards, allowing GPU-accelerated ...

1.0 script language (Shadertoy) for hardware accelerated 2D/3D visual effects development. * Customisable UI. * "PyPlug" custom node creation system (equivalent to Nuke Gizmos).

Notes

References

External links

* {{Compositing Software Compositing software Free and open-source software Software that uses Qt Animation software