Natron Tutorial | How to Render / Export / Write

Taking a detailed look and exporting / rendering / writing (all the same thing) from Natron. Forgive me for how unstructured this video is, unfortunately there a some instability issues with Natron when it comes to rendering so it's a bit unpredictable but I go over some good processes to make sure your render works every time.
This video is part of a learn Natron KZbin course, playlist here:
• Learn Natron Compositing
Footage download:
720:
drive.google.c...
UHD:
drive.google.c...
X-Wing:
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Music: www.bensound.com
#Natron #Exporting #Rendering
Natron Series Course Outline:
Ep1: Introduction and GUI overview
- Node Menu and side menu
- Top menu
- Invisible Setting node
- User settings (shift + s)
- Node graph
- Viewer
- Nodes being a tools/settings container
Ep2: Key framing
- Keyframe state on and off and note expressions
- Using the viewer timeline and dope sheet to spot keyframes
- Animate a colour wheel to bounce
- Using the curve editor
Ep3: Tracking
- Tracker node
- Point track
- Copying track to transform node
- 4 point track and corner pin
- Linked vs unlinked
- Using corner pins to do quick roto
Ep4: Channels and Premultiplication
- RGB
- Alpha channel
- Premultiplication
Ep5: The Merge node
- Quick explanation of A over B
- Over, under, max, screen, mask, stencil, difference, minus
- How to see the math for the others
Ep6: Marker removal
- Paint clean frame
- Transform offset
- Corner pin
- Switch matte
Ep7: Basic Compositing
- Text Element
- Apply corner pin
- Make cast shadow
Ep8: Rendering
- Movie files vs image sequences
- Common file types; exr, mov
- Render settings: channels, path, hash, frame range, unpremultiplied
- Babying the render
- Checking the render
My socials:
Instagram: / harry_chrisp
Twitch: / pro_hazza
TikTok: harry_chrisp
Twitter: / harry_chrisp
Other KZbin: / @prohazer4818
Website: harrychrisp.com/

[@ttaacchhaa]

Hey Harry, thanks for the tutorial! Seeing this I wonder, what would be the benefit of using Natron instead of Davinci Resolve? It's like a massive loss of time and effort to deal with the bugs. Just to get used to Nuke? Anyway, I like this puts Natron in the scene, I hope they find people to keep developing it.

[@HarryChrisp]

Hey Sergio, Resolve / Fusion is certainly a valid way to go. I personally use Natron because of its similarities to Nuke and I haven't given fusion the time yet to become proficient with it but I should as I use resolve to color grade. I also suppose having more competition keeps pressure on the software developers to keep make good improvements :)

[@mareknovotny5833]

hello i have a problem i have exr wich in davnic has alpha and in natron maybe.. but after export from natron there is no alpha even with exr export.. where would i look for solution ? Edit: I solved I found aplha channel and finde its definiton and mask it there. A.color btw it wos in my file.

[@HarryChrisp]

Glad you figured it out!

[@Antarttix]

Hi mate. Thanks for tutorial it helps. I found out that exporting in tiff`s is closest and least problematic for my projects using 2.5. must say im total beginer in natron and compositing so i cant be sure why, but after tried lots of other format vid or images tiff wins dont know why just does. Anyway great help

[@killnj6071]

For some reason I couldn't export it

[@NomadFlow]

Hi, Harry! A new version of Natron, version 2.4 was just released earlier this week. You think can make a video reviewing the new version? Thanks for making videos on Natron!

[@HarryChrisp]

Done :)

[@devinorium]

smooth XD@@HarryChrisp

[@streamsandgalaxies]

Hi, great tuts, BTW! I am still getting familiar with VFX & haven't gotten too far since I spent alot of time trying to just get community Nuke to install with my (Ubuntu) OS but ran into too much trouble so I'm back trying out Natron . Have you used Natron 2.5? Just wondering if the issues mentioned have been resolved or will I still encounter them? Also since I have Tiff sequences with image.list can I save to Tiff 16bit instead? Finally, if I setup my folder path and ## correctly, when I re-render specific images that failed, Natron will just insert them automatically into the sequence folder? Thanks in advance!

[@HarryChrisp]

Thanks! I only have the answers to some of those questions so here goes: I think I briefly tried Natron 2.5, still has bugs. Not sure about image.list but I’d assume Natron supports 16 bit tiffs. Yes, when rendering image sequences, filling in only the broken frames will work

[@overlordspam]

Hi, nice tutorial! I see you render multiple exr images and then read them all as a single file. Is there a quick way of combining them inside or outside of Natron that I'm missing? None of my mp4 renders have a high enough quality.

[@HarryChrisp]

Thanks! Exr files store each frame as separate files with the frame number in the name. They don’t get combined, just read as an “image sequence” by whatever software you use. They’re not meant as a final file type that you might publish to KZbin but more for low compression floating point (large) intermediate file type.

[@overlordspam]

@@HarryChrisp Thank you for your quick reply! Gotcha, I haven't played with image sequences much before. KDENLive doesn't seem to like the ones I've created, but I'll keep playing around with some settings. Much appreciated!

[@richardjensen7186]

So, my first take-away is that you prefer .exr, which almost nothing (but Adobe -- expensive) supports. You entire "tutorial" is a lopsided presentation of a single approach that nobody like me will EVER use. You've got few views, and perhaps part of the problem is that almost nobody cares about the approach you use here. I was looking for something about how to produce an output file in a container/codec combo that most applications will actually handle. This video is not that, so perhaps change your title to "How to Render an EXR image-sequence in Natron." My second take-away is that Natron is indeed super-buggy! That's been my personal experience, which coheres with what I've read, which is why I'm searching for how to deal with Natron bugs (in this case, rendering bugs). After hours of thrashing my way through a pretty simple composite (continual crashes of the latest version of Natron doing the simplest things), I finally decided to try to render the result. I can't find a single container/codec combination that is both lossless and will play on or be imported by anything (VLC, WMP, PowerDirector, DaVinci Resolve, etc.). I'm NOT going to embrace the .exr approach and pay Adobe. Thus, the big upside to your video is to validate my assessment that Natron is just not ready for serious work by people who value their time. Good-bye Natron. I'll try Blender and DaVinci Fusion next. Nuke is just crazy expensive if you're not a pro. Thanks for the validation, but in itself this video is more of a bug-report than a tutorial. Perhaps post a link to it on Github and see if the devs care to deal with any of it. What I've seen thus far on Github is that the devs take a "Well, it's free, so don't have too high of expectations" attitude. That doesn't bode well, and the fact that such pervasive rendering (and other) bugs still remain in such a "mature" application also doesn't bode well. Time to move on.

[@HarryChrisp]

Hi Richard, EXR is an open source format created by ILM and widely used in VFX and the film industry more broadly, not just Adobe. DaVinci resolve supports EXR and there is a free version of Resolve so the workflow I show here is available without the need to purchase any software. Yes, Natron is buggy which is why I consider this part of my tutorial series so important. I choose to work with the EXR workflow for many reasons one of them being it helps mitigate the losses from buggy renders by allowing you to keep the frames that worked. Once you have a complete render then you can compress it into a lite h.264 or something similar to work with as a proxy. Also, I've found using more precomps helps Natron get through bigger scripts. Hope this helps!

[@richardjensen7186]

@@HarryChrisp Thank you for the reply. I have DaVinci Resolve, and when I try to import an EXR file it complains the the format isn't recognized. Regarding how "widely used" the format is, I have researched this point extensively, including on sites the exhaustively list the applications that support the format, and it is certainly not "widely used." It might be "supported enough" by some subset of applications that a particular user prefers. Good on such users. But I do not believe that it is accurate to assert that the format is widely used. That said, your point about being able to keep the parts of the Natron render that worked is extremely well-taken! But that just emphasizes the more sweeping point that Natron is just ridiculously buggy. I appreciate your attitude in your response. I would follow your channel, but I have decided to abandon Natron. My time is worth more than the expense of purchasing a compositing application that is not bug-ridden. Thank you!

[@apestogetherstrong341]

Why don't you report these issues to their page on github?

[@HarryChrisp]

As far as I know there isn’t anyone currently developing Natron

[@NomadFlow]

So I guess that's a no?

[@HarryChrisp]

What’s a no?

[@NomadFlow]

@@HarryChrisp I made a post in this comment section a couple of weeks ago telling you about Natron version 2.4 being released and asked if you could do a review of it since it means that the project is still being worked on it. You didn't respond.

[@HarryChrisp]

@@NomadFlow Sorry, my bad for not responding! I read it and am working on that video right now, it's taking longer than usual because my current setup is a work in progress. Was hoping to have it out this Tuesday but it's looking more like next week

[@NomadFlow]

@@HarryChrisp Ok, great! Thanks again for your tutorials on Natron!

[@nikhilmosamkar1689]

Hi

[@HarryChrisp]

Hey

[@nikhilmosamkar1689]

@@HarryChrisp is there a 3d software like blender for low end pc pls I need that for java programming

[@HarryChrisp]

@@nikhilmosamkar1689 sorry I'm not as experienced with 3d software but wouldn't blender be suitable for that?

[@nikhilmosamkar1689]

@@HarryChrisp Hey the window that pops up is very different in my windows 7 64 bit

[@nikhilmosamkar1689]

Like the window at 2:02