Free online course: RHEL Technical Overview.A viewer panel along the top of the window displays the current node in isolation by default.There's a Properties panel on the right for you to control the attributes of each node.Each component of your composition is a node, and you connect them with flowchart-style arrows commonly called 'noodles.' By default, Natron includes a ready-to-use Viewer node in your initial node graph. You have a node graph area where you map out how the elements of your composition relate to one another.Whether you're using Natron or a non-open compositor, the idea behind the compositing interface is generally the same: On Elementary, Mint, and other Debian-based distributions: $ sudo apt install natron

On Fedora, Mageia, and similar distributions: $ sudo dnf install natron Natron is available on most Linux distributions from your package manager. After reading this, you won't be a pro, but you'll know where to begin. The compositing application Natron takes advantage of this open technology, plus the time-honored interface models of 'noodles and nodes,' to bring professional compositing to open source software users.Ĭompositing is a big and complex job, but this article introduces you to the basics of what you need to know about the interface of Natron and some basic principles of compositing. Happily, the film industry does a lot more with open source and cross-studio collaboration than you might expect, and so some of the best tools to process digital images (including OpenColorIO, OpenEXR, OpenFX, and more) have become ubiquitous. Still, when your entire job is to bring different components together and make it look like they were in front of the camera in real life at the time of the shooting, you need a dedicated application with some very specific tooling. Most video editing applications can do basic compositing.

Sometimes there are just a few overlays, other times there's some minor special effect like laser beams or explosions, sometimes it's a green screen, and still other times it's a little bit of everything. What that actually means to the compositing artist depends on the movie. In film post-production, there's a phase called compositing, which puts the actual footage in a camera with footage generated purely by software.

Natron software video editor