Natron-1.0.0-RC2

Natron RC2

Changelog:

• New nodes using the CImg library :
  • Blur
  • Dilate
  • Erode
  • Bilateral
  • Noise
  • Denoise
  • Plasma
  • Smooth
  • Equalize
• New Clamp node
• Re-written internal rendering engine. It now uses CPU at almost 100%. The default settings
  in the preferences are set to tune the render engine for basic usage and are optimal
  for a station with 8 cores. Some tuning may be needed for stations with huge number of cores
  (24, 32...).

Here's a description of the new settings controlling the multi-threading in Natron, use it
wisely:

• Number of render threads: This will limit the number of threads used by any rendering
  globally. By default this will use the number of cores of your CPU, indicated by the value 0.
• Number of parallel renders: New in RC2, Natron now parallelise the rendering of frames
  by rendering ahead during playback or rendering on disk.
  By default this is adjusted automatically and synchronised with the Number of render threads
  parameter so that it never exceeds the CPU maximum number of cores. Setting a value different
  than 0, will set the number of frames that will be computed at the same time.
• Effect use thread-pool: New in RC2, Natron uses internally what is called a thread-pool
  to manage all the multi-threading and to ensure we never overload the CPU. This is a very
  efficient technology to avoid the system to spend to much time in scheduling threads by
  recycling threads.
  Unfortunately, some plug-ins expect threads to be fresh and new before they start rendering
  and using the application's thread-pool will make them unstable. In particular all
  plug-ins of The Foundry Furnace product seems to crash if used in a thread-pool environment.
  We recommend to uncheck this setting before using any of The Foundry Furnace plug-in.
  Natron will warn you if the setting is checked and you attempt to use any of The Foundry
  Furnace plug-in.
• Max threads usable per effect: New in RC2, this controls how many threads a single node
  can use to render an image. By default the value internally is set to 4 if you select 0. Beyond
  that value we observed degraded performance because the system spends most of its time
  scheduling the threads rather than doing the actual processing. You may however set the value
  as you wish for convenience.
• The background renderer can now take an optional frame range in parameter with the following syntax:
  NatronRenderer —w MyFirstWriter 10-40 -w MySecondWriter MyProject.ntp
  If no frame range is specified, the whole frame range specified by the node will be rendered.
• The setting "Render in a separate process" is now off by default as it seems that rendering
  live is always a little bit faster due to the setup time of the second process.
• RGBLut plug-in has been renamed to ColorLookUp and now allows arbitrary input values range (instead of clamping input values to 0-1) and can now clamp output values with specific parameters (Clamp black/Clamp white). The curves can now be constrained to move either in X or Y direction by holding the control key.
• The keyframes in the curve editor and in the ColorLookUp plug-in can now have their value set by double clicking on their text. This also applies to the derivatives.
• Fixed the file dialog by changing radically its implementation making it faster and
  more reliable.
• Added a new Find node dialog that is accessible by pressing CTRL-F in the node graph or by the right click menu
• Natron will read correctly the pixel aspect ratio of the images and display them
  correctly. Due to an OpenFX limitation, if several images in a sequence don't
  have the same pixel aspect ratio, only the pixel aspect ratio of the first image
  in the sequence will be taken into account. This cannot be dynamic.
• When reading RGB opaque images, and using them as RGBA, Natron will set the alpha channel
  to 0 to match what other compositing softwares do. In some rare cases there might be issues
  with premultiplication state in some filter plug-ins. In particular the unpremult parameter
  of the filter nodes (such as Grade) will be checked and can cause a black image.
  If you really do not want to have support for RGB images, you can disable RGB support
  in the General preferences of Natron.
  • Roto node will now output RGBA data by default. You can switch it to Alpha only
    when editing masks for maximum efficiency.
• Interface clean-up: We adjusted all drop-down menus so that they look more consistent
  with the rest of the interface and on Windows the menu bar has also been redesigned.
• You can now click in the navigator window of the node graph to move the center the node graph on a position
• MacOSX retina displays are not supported yet (icons needs to be all reshaped)
  hence we disabled high DPI support when Natron is used on a mac.
• Adjusted slightly the ReadFFMPEG node to be more tolerant with files that may have
  failed to be read in the past.
• Fixed a few bugs with project paths
• The user can now simplify a project path or make it relative or absolute by right clicking any
  filepath parameter.
• Fixed a few bugs with the render progression report
• Copy/Paste of a node will use an index-based copy differentiation instead of an incremental
  number of "- copy" appended to the original node name.
  For example: "Blur" "Blur.1" "Blur.2", etc...
• The project now contains more informations visible in the Infos tab of the project settings.
  In particular, we added the following:
• Original author name (the person who created the project) (read-only)
• Last author name (the person who last saved this project) (read-only)
• Creation date (read-only)
• Last save date (read-only)
• Added a comments area where you can write anything the user might want to write. For example it
  can be used to add the license of the project, give a description of what it does, etc...
• The viewer FPS is now properly saved into the project file.
• Natron is now more flexible for plug-ins that do not respect entirely the OpenFX
  specification so that more plug-ins can be used in Natron. In particular you can now
  use the TuttleHistogramKeyer node.