What is Reddit's opinion of
Natron?
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23 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
Thanks! So this effect is called pixel sorting. You can do it in Gimp, Photoshop, After Effects etc and probably on some websites too. But this image was made using Natron which is a free and open source software (FOSS) as I wanted to test whether one can do editing in a composition based software or not.
This is mostly something called compositing. Look into compositing for motion graphics and visual effects. There are tons tutorials on YouTube.
The most common software is After Effects and Nuke. If you have experience with Photoshop, After Effects might be easier to start with because the layout is similar. I'm not sure, but you may be able to get a free student license. If that doesn't work for you, there are open source versions. I've never used them, so I can't say if they are any good or how well you will be able to find tutorials. But they are free.
I found this: https://natrongithub.github.io/
Also, as a 3D artist, I would be remiss if I didn't tell to look into that. If you are a student, you should be able to subscribe to Autodesk's Maya for free. Learning 3D on your own might be a pain, but you might have some playing with it. There are tons of tutorials. If you can't get Maya for free, try Blender. It's open source, so you won't have to buy it. Also, there are fair number of tutorials.
If you go for compositing, start with beginner tutorials, of course. Find tutorials that walk you through the layout. Then, search for beginner videos on importing videos, rotoscoping, layering, key framing animation, opacity, blending layers. It's a lot photoshop with motion, so it wouldn't hurt to play with photoshop, too.
If you go for 3D, find tutorials for the layout. Then, I would suggest trying modeling with polygons. That should keep you busy for a while.
If you want to go to school for it, look for Digital Media programs or visual effects or motion graphics.
Good luck. And I'll answer other questions if you have them.
I totally agree. I'm in also in the move from switching from 3ds Max to Blender.
Other free software for you to have a look at:
Compositing: https://natrongithub.github.io/
Photogrammetry: https://github.com/alicevision/meshroom
2D drawing: https://krita.org/en/
I'm going to come at this from the freeware angle (I know you asked specifically about Nuke or After Effects but u/effectsfreak pretty much summed my thoughts up exactly).
If you are looking to not throw money at knowledge rather than software, I would suggest Natron or Blender. Natron, because it is basically Nuke without the built in 3D system, and Blender because of its 3D capabilities (i.e. camera tracking, particle systems etc.). Blender also is great for the motion graphics stuff that most people look for in AE - with the added benefit of being a full 3D package.
One added bonus is that both Blender and Natron don't require the computer specs that AE and Nuke do. So you can most likely run them on your computer right now and test it out.
This is just one other perspective. Best of luck on your journey. Compositing is so much fun!
if you're wanting to test the waters of node based compositing, check out Blackmagic Fusion. There's a free version that only has a few features disabled, and if you really get into it, the studio version is only 300$. I don't have tons of experience with it, but it'll give you a feel for node based basics. I wouldn't worry about it not being Nuke, the fundamentals should transfer and a studio should train you up in Nuke if they want you on their team. I've found ConFusion's tutorials to be pretty helpful to get up and running.
There's also Natron, which I've heard is basically an open source Nuke clone. I have zero experience with it hough.
Biggest thing is to just get in and start comping. Something is better than nothing.
I explained it in my post over at /r/waltdisneyworld, but I'll copy it here:
It's not too complex. The castle shape doesn't match the real castle anyway, so there's no way to get something perfect. What I did was put the projector, then I drew a quick outline of the castle parts so that I could align it roughly, I got a sketch like this, then I used Natron to try and distort a video from youtube to at least match the visible elements like the clock. I can't distort it too much otherwise the fireworks become ellipses and look wonky. It's far from perfect, but it looks good overall. All in all it takes about 5 minutes to prepare a video, then however long the render takes. It's honestly simpler than I expected it would be.
The projector is a cheap aopen mini projector, it's "only" 720p, but that's enough for something like this, and it plays videos by itself, no need for a pc. And I got it at boxing day for ~50$, so it's great for what it is. It doesn't do keystoning, so that adds a lot to the distortion, but the illusion still works.
I've replied to someone above, but it's really simple. A lot simpler than I was expecting.
The castle shape doesn't match the real castle anyway, so there's no way to get something perfect. What I did was put the projector, then I drew a quick outline of the castle parts so that I could align it roughly, I got a sketch like this, then I used Natron to try and distort a video from youtube to at least match the visible elements like the clock. I can't do it too much otherwise the fireworks become ellipses and look wonky. It's far from perfect, but it looks good overall. All in all it takes about 5 minutes to prepare a video, then however long the render takes. It's nothing crazy.
It's not too bad. The castle shape doesn't match the real castle anyway, so there's no way to get something perfect. What I did was put the projector, then I drew a quick outline of the castle parts so that I could align it roughly, I got a sketch like this, then I used Natron to try and distort a video from youtube to at least match the visible elements like the clock. I can't do it too much otherwise the fireworks become ellipses and look wonky. It's far from perfect, but it looks good overall. All in all it takes about 5 minutes to prepare a video, then however long the render takes. It's nothing crazy.
It likes a whole lot more than that (running 128GB myself)
You could try Blackmagic Fusion. It’s free.
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion/
Also Natron. It’s free and open source.
if you want to learn that bad you should take over developing natron: Natron its free and open source, so if you try to make money off of it lots of people will be mad. its kind of a nuke clone, but without some features.
A good place to start out would be either Natron or DaVinci Resolve’s built-in Fusion. It doesn’t really matter what you start out with to be honest. That’s another great thing about node-based compositors, once you got the principles down they all work the same, because the concept is dead simple. You always have a node graph and
A great tutorial for Natron is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0yU6Gptfto
Guy is very calm and explains everything great. He’s a 3d and VFX artist who does a lot of stuff with generative methods, so great resource for that.
If you want to get an overview about the differences of layers and nodes at first, I recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgvswMcsrps (Nuke is very similar to Natron btw)
Keep in mind that node-based doesn’t necessarily mean automated or generative, but it does open up another world of possibilities and most of these compositors are very easily scriptable (though After Effects is, too).
Try a free compositing app then.
BlackMagic Fusion - free https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/fusion/
Natron - free https://natrongithub.github.io/
Blender -free (3D software that can also composite) https://www.blender.org/
But if you need Adobe After Effects, cough up the $20 a month.
If you want a free alternative to After Effects, look into Natron
GIMP is really not the program you want to use to create video.
Frankly it'd be very cool if Natron got some developer love as IMO it's a much better workflow than what Blender has going. Lots of people think its features should be integrated into Blender but I think that's definitely not the right route to go and it seems the current devs also take that stance.
You could try Natron, but it is currently abandoned, they were looking for new maintainers more than a year ago and nothing came out of it.
https://www.blendernation.com/2018/12/05/non-blender-natron-needs-maintainer-and-funds/ http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/the-demise-of-natron
Well, depending on whether you are looking for a compositor or a simple cut editor the answers might vary in quality :)
I'm using a mixture of these, combined with blender:
- Kdenlive for simple stuff
- Natron
- Flowblade
- Lightworks
I also wanted to try out Olive, but haven't gotten around to it yet. As my DE is mostly GNOME, I'm kinda looking for a better alternative to Kdenlive with less dependencies of the KDE/QT ecosystem.
I just use ffmpeg and extract all the frames from the video and then edit each frame with gimp then turn the frames back into video with ffmpeg. It takes forever.
I am trying to figure out how to use Natron
but it seems really complicated to learn but it seems like it would be a lot faster.
> I don't want to pay and my computer isn't very good
Normally, I'd send you over to the software thread. Or over to /r/vfx - because this isn't editing (although it's used in editing)
There aren't many choices in the "free rotoscope" life.
Fusion (also now made by BMD, free version may run better than Resolve)
The other choice here is Natron
Good Luck.
Never did a replication, just some video effects
Adobe After effects / premiere it's probably a good choice if accessable for you.
https://natrongithub.github.io is the best thing I know for free. But probably a video editing sub or r/replications can help you probably better with that kind of question.
If you're working with a video sequence, instead of using Photoshop, you should probably use After Effects (which is, at a really high level, like Photoshop for video). Or try out Natron, which I haven't used but have heard good things about.
Judging by the question, I'm assuming you've never done anything like this before. One thing you'll have to be really careful about is making sure you properly light the green screen. If it's lit poorly, it'll barely be worth having a green screen at all as you'll have to do a ton of manual work.
> Pop!_OS is tailored specifically for creators, but not of the artistic type.
Actually, that's also the target audience. That's why we include packages like Natron in our repositories.
Replace Premiere with Davinci Resolve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsSlYk6PSY Don't forget to install nvidia-cuda-toolkit if you have Nvidia, ocl-icd-opencl-dev if you have AMD.
Replace After Effects with Natron. https://natrongithub.github.io/
It is very possible. I recommend you find a better quality source video though.
This would best be done in a video editor of some sort, like AfterEffects (for example on the green screen you could use the keylight filter to remove the green screen). A photo/still image editor like Photoshop would be a lot more limited.
I don't have a good overview of video editors, at least not free ones. Maybe you could use https://natrongithub.github.io