https://forum.natron.fr/c/tutorials
32 bits floating point linear color processing pipeline.
Colorspace management handled by the famous open-source OpenColorIO library.
Dozens of file formats supported: EXR, DPX,TIFF, PSD, SVG, Raw, JPG, PNG…thanks to OpenImageIO. and FFmpeg.
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: (these are proprietary software and not free)
RevisionFX products
NeatVideo denoiser
Furnace by The Foundry
KeyLight by The Foundry
GenArts Sapphire
Other GenArts products
And many more.
OpenFX v1.4 supported
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 optimised 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.
Recover easily from bugs: An auto-save system detects inactivity and saves your work for yourself. Also Natron provides the option to render a graph in a separate process, meaning that any crash in the main application would not crash the ongoing render (and the other way around).
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 2.0 or 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 functionnalities.
Natron embeds a Python 2.7 interpreter that can be used to customize thoroughly the application. Read the documentation at natron.rtfd.org.
Multi-plane: In Natron all layers read from EXR’s or TIFF’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.
Roadmap & features for future versions:
Optical Flow nodes: VectorGenerator, Motion Blur, Retimer, RollingShutter
Natural matting: Extract a foreground of an image without necessarily a green/blue-screen background.
Deep data: Support for deep data (multiple samples per pixel)
3D workspace: The 3D workspace will first be in fact only 2.5D: That is support for Cards onto which are projected textures. Then it will also support 3D projection of textures through a camera as well as UV editing for 3D match-moving.
