Natron compositing software

Perhaps Natron could serve as a close WebVfx replacement. For everyone that creates a new post asking “where is WebVfx”, we could say “use Natron and be happy”. Maybe that would be a more satisfying answer than saying Shotcut lost an entire feature set.

Apparently, at one point Kdenlive had Natron integration on their roadmap. I’d love that integration to happen on Shotcut one day but through Shotcut’s UI. We don’t need all of Natron’s bells and whistles, but I’d love to be able to do motion tracking within Shotcut.

I was thinking for a while that it’d be cool if there was some sort of dynamic linking that could be achieved between Shotcut and Natron much in a similar way there is between Premiere Pro and After Effects. A version of that is sort of done with GIMP and Darktable or RawTherapee when raw images need to be opened in GIMP.

The problem is that Natron lost all its devs. There is just one maintainer doing very light maintenance on it. Since that’s the case I’d prefer that Dan and Brian just concentrate on what they have on their roadmap for Shotcut. The best way to use Shotcut with Natron currently is to use lossless codecs like HuffYUV between the travel of Shotcut to Natron and back to Shotcut to avoid any video quality loss.

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It looks like Natron has picked up steam again. They released 2.4.0 just six days ago and it’s a pretty big code change, including upgrading the FFmpeg integration to the v4 API. That’s not easy stuff, so it looks like they’ve got some serious devs on the project now.

I still think Natron is worthy of mention because “difficult Shotcut tasks” that used to require WebVfx or other complex filters can be done in Natron fairly easily then brought into Shotcut. Being able to do elaborate titling in Natron and bring it into Shotcut could convince people to continue using Shotcut even though Shotcut may not have every feature they want on its own.

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Really useful information, @austin. I’ll check it out! Thanks so much!

That’s very good news. Thanks for sharing @Austin !
I installed the new release and it repeatedly crashed a few seconds after loading an old project :confounded:
But rebooting my PC seemed to fix that problem.

You can watch 'TJ FREE ’ YT channel on Natron series. It’s easy tutorials & also he explained everything about Natron.