Natron: a digital compositing application similar to After Effects

bicarbonate of soda is a free and open source software that allows us digital composition, this app is influenced by different digital composition softwares such as SoftEddie, Avid Media Illusion, Apple Shake, Blackmagic Fusion, Autodesk Flame, and Nuke, from which it derives its user interface and many of its concepts.

bicarbonate of soda supports plugins following OpenFX 1.4 API. Most commercial and open source OpenFX plug-ins are supported.

About Natron

The program is produced by Blackmagic Fusion to be free, portable, cross-platform, and offer robust and efficient tools for composers to achieve high-quality results and fast rates.

bicarbonate of soda has a familiar user interface, easy to navigate and customize, and includes visualization support multi-screen and Retina display on MacOSX.

The program is light (compared to other programs in this category), and to use it you only need to have a PC with a processor of at least 2.3 GHz or higher, with at least 3 GB of RAM and a graphics card compatible with OpenGL 2.0 OpenGL 1.5 with some extensions.

Many of you will know that none of Adobe's products are available for Linux platforms, so Natron is an excellent alternative to After Effects that is worth trying and giving it a try.

bicarbonate of soda It has the following characteristics, among which we can highlight:

• Intuitive user interface : Natron aims not to break habits by providing an intuitive and familiar user interface. The graphical user interface can be split into any number of screens. It is compatible with Retina displays on MacOSX.
• Multitask : Natron can render multiple graphics at the same time and make use of 100% of the computing power of your CPU.
• Network representation: Natron can be used as a command line tool and can be integrated into a rendering farm manager like Afanasy.
• Natron renderer- A command line tool for running Python scripts and project files. The command line version is executable from ssh on a non-display computer.
• Quick and interactive viewer - Consistent and accurate zoom / pan even for very large image sizes (tested on 27k x 30k images).
• Real time playback : Natron offers real-time playback thanks to its RAM / disk cache technology. Once a frame is rendered, it can be instantly reproduced afterward, even for large image sizes.
• Motion editing : Natron offers a simple and efficient way of dealing with keyframes with a very accurate and intuitive curve editor. You can set expressions on animation curves to create easy and believable movement for objects.
• Natron also incorporates a full-featured information sheet for quickly editing clips and keyframes in space-time.
• Multi-view workflow: Natron saves time by keeping all views in the same sequence. You can detach views at any time with the OneView node.
• Rotoscopy / Rotopainting- Edit your skins and animate them to work with complex shots
• Scripting in Python: Natron has made most of its functionality available through its Python API.
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How to install Natron on Linux?

If you want to install this application on your system you must go to the following link where you can download the application.

In the case of Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives of these you must open a terminal and execute the following command:

wget https://downloads.natron.fr/Linux/releases/64bit/files/natron_2.3.12_amd64.deb

And the you install with your preferred application manager or with this command:

sudo dpkg -i Natron*.deb

sudo apt-get install -f

For the case of Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE or any distribution with support for rpm packages you must execute this command:

wget https://downloads.natron.fr/Linux/releases/64bit/files/Natron-2.3.12-1.x86_64.rpm

For install on an openSUSE or one of its derivatives, open a terminal and run:

sudo zypper install Natron*.rpm

While to install it on Fedora, RedHa, CentOS and their derivatives, use the following command:

sudo yum local install Natron*.rpm

sudo dnf install Natron*.rpm