Natron Features

On the surface Natron has a powerful GUI interface that is a flexible and intuitive multi-platform node based engine. Natron may seem to be a simple compositing application but it does have layers of complexity that will allow your creativity to reach new heights. Natron has flexible Roto and Rotopaint tool-set that can generate unlimited layers of masks, mattes and shapes. Natron has a powerful 2D and Planar tracker to help reduce hours of rotoscoping to meet personal or client deadlines. It has some strong keying or matte generation tools that has been developed from the main OFX software developers and a plethora of tools from the open source plugin developing community.

Some Feature Insights

• 32 bits floating point linear color processing pipeline.
• Colorspace management handled by OpenColorIO.
• Dozens of file formats supported: EXR, DPX, TIFF, PSD, SVG, RAW, JPG, PNG … and more.
• Support for OpenFX v1.4

• Support for many free and open-source OpenFX plugins:
• OpenFX-IO : to read anything else than standard 8-bits images (bundled with pre-compiled versions of Natron).
• OpenFX-Misc : A set of basic nodes, such as Transform, chroma keyer, etc… (bundled with the pre-compiled versions of Natron).
• OpenFX-Arena : A set of extra nodes (bundled with the pre-compiled versions of Natron).
• OpenFX-OpenCV : A set of plugins based on OpenCV.
• OpenFX-Yadif deinterlacer : An open-source efficient de-interlacer.
• OpenFX-Vegas SDK samples
• OpenFX samples (in the Support and Examples directories)

• Support for commercial OpenFX plugins:
• RevisionFX products
• NeatVideo denoiser
• Furnace by The Foundry
• KeyLight by The Foundry
• GenArts Sapphire
• Other GenArts products
• Universe by Red Giant Software
• Ignite by HitFilm
• And many more.

• Intuitive user interface: Natron aims not to break habits by providing an intuitive and familiar user interface.  It is possible to separate on any number of screens the graphical user interface. It supports Retina screens on MacOSX.

• Performances:  Never wait for anything to be rendered, in Natron anything you do produces real-time feedback thanks to its optimized multi-threaded rendering pipeline and its support for proxy rendering (i.e: the render pipeline can be computed at lower res to speed-up rendering).

• Multi-task: Natron can render multiple graphs at the same time and make use of 100% of the compute power of your CPU.

• Network rendering: Natron can be used as a command-line tool and can be integrated on a render farm manager such as Afanasy.

• NatronRenderer: A command line tool for execution of project files and python scripts. The command line version is executable from ssh on a computer without any display.

• Fast & interactive Viewer – Smooth & accurate  zooming/panning even for very large image sizes (tested on 27k x 30k images).

• Real-time playback: Natron offers  a real-time playback with thanks to its RAM/Disk cache technology. Once a frame is rendered, it can be reproduced instantly afterwards, even for large image sizes.

• Low hardware requirements: All you need is an x86 64 bits or 32 bits processor, at least 3 GB of RAM and a graphic card that supports OpenGL 1.5+ with some extensions.

• Motion editing: Natron offers a simple and efficient way to deal with keyframes with a very accurate and intuitive curve editor. You can set expressions on animation curves to create easy and believable motion for objects. Natron also incorporates a fully featured dope-sheet to quickly edit clips and keyframes in time-space.

• Multi-view workflow: Natron saves time by keeping all the views in the same stream. You can separate the views at any time with the OneView node.

• Rotoscoping/Rotopainting: Edit your masks and animate them to work with complex shots

• Tracker node: A point tracker is  embedded in Natron to track multiple points. Version 2.1 of Natron will incorporate the Tracker from Blender.

• Presets: Nodes presets can be imported/exported easily with an XML file format

• Python scripting: Natron has made available via its Python API most of its functionalities.
  Natron embeds a Python 2.7 interpreter that can be used to customize the application. .

• Multi-plane: In Natron all layers read from EXR’s, TIFF’s or PSD’s are available as planes that each node can access. You can also freely create your own custom planes. This allows for cleaner graphs and more efficient work.

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