Natron-1.0.0-RC3

Change-log RC3:

• The internal renderer now estimates the amount of RAM needed by a compositing tree to render out a single frame and will thus limit the number of parallel renders so that all parallel renders can fit in RAM if possible. Before this change the renderer would only take into account CPU load which would seriously slow down computers without enough RAM to support all the CPU power available.

• Focus has been re-worked through all the interface so the focus switches correctly
  among the widgets when pressing Tab. Drop-downs can now get the focus so the user can
  scroll the items by pressing the up/down arrows.
  Checkbox can now also have focus and you can check/uncheck them by pressing the space bar.
  Left toolbar buttons also get the focus and you can expand them by pressing the right
  arrow.

• Added possibility to move the timeline from anywhere in the interface, assuming the widget your
  mouse is currently hovering doesn't interpret those key-binds for another functionality.

• Focus is now indicated by a orange border around the widget that currently owns it.

• The node-graph navigator has been speeded-up, there was a bug where everything was rendered
  twice.

• A new button in the settings panel of a node can now hide all parameters that do not have any modification.

• It is now possible to close a settings panel by pressing the Escape key when hovering it

• When double-clicking a backdrop node and holding down the control key, this will clear all settings panel currently opened in the properties bin, and open the panels of all the nodes within the backdrop.

• It is now possible to zoom the range of a slider around the current position by holding certain
  modifiers: Hold CTRL to zoom-in x10, hold CTRL + SHIFT to zoom-in x100
  This can help adjusting precisely a parameter value

• It is now possible to extract one or more nodes from the graph by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + X
  or via the right click menu. This will keep the connections between all extracted nodes
  but remove them from the surrounding tree and shift them by 200 pixels on the right.

• It is now possible to merge 2 nodes (with a MergeOFX node) by holding CTRL + SHIFT and moving a node
  close to another one. The bounding box of both nodes should be green, indicating that a
  merge is possible.

• A new Info tab on each node now contains informations about the format of images coming
  from each input and out-going from the node. This can help understand what data
  is really processed under the hood.

• New shortcut to set the zoom level of the viewer to 100% (CTRL + 1)

• New shortcut to toggle preview images for selected nodes: ALT + P

• Added the possibility to edit node names in the node graph by pressing the key N

• The backdrop node now has its name in the header affected by the font family and color.
  However the size of the name is controlled by a different parameter so the name and the content
  can have different font sizes.

• Roto: when selecting points with the selection rectangle, only points that belong to selected curves will be eligible for selection, unless no curve is selected, in which case all the points are eligible.

• Roto : when selecting points with the selection rectangle, if the SHIFT modifier is held down, it will not clear the previous selection. Also when holding down SHIFT, clicking on a selected point will remove it from the selection. Similarly, if selecting points with the selection rectangle but while holding down both SHIFT and CTRL will now allow to keep the previous selection but remove from the selection the newly selected points.

• Roto : the beziers animation can now be controlled in the curve editor, as well as the per-shape parameters.

• The ColorCorrect and Grade nodes can now choose on which channels to operate on, including the alpha channel

• The viewer info bar font has been changed to the same font of the rest of the application
  and a line of 1 pixel now separates the Viewer from the informations.

• The viewer refresh button will now be red when it is actively rendering (not using the
  cache).

• The turbo-mode button is now next to the FPS box of the viewer’s player bar instead of being on top of the properties bin.

• The paste/duplicate/clone nodes operations now position new nodes under the mouse cursor.

• The D (for disabling nodes) and CTRL+F (for finding nodes) shortcuts are now available across the UI. The same thing was applied for timeline interaction (such as seek next/previous/start/end,etc…) wherever it was possible.

• New Blender OpenColorIO-Config which is now the default one instead of nuke-default.
  Warning dialogs will show up if the current configuration is not the default one.

  • New OCIOLook node to apply a look to the image. This node uses the 67 looks
    provided by the Blender OpenColorIO config.
  • New luma Keyer node
  • New ramp node
  • New BlurGuided node using the CImg library. This is a faster bilateral blur
  • New AdjustRoD node to enlarge/shrink the region of definition (bounding box) of an image
  • A new button on the Transform node allows to recenter the handle to the center of the
    input image.
  • The project can now be versioned by pressing CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + S (or by the
    File menu). This will save the project and increment its version, e.g:
    MyProject_001.ntp
    MyProject_002.ntp
    ...
  • The Tab dialog to create quickly a node now remembers the name of the last node that
    was created
  • A BlurCImg node can now be created using the B key
  • The right click menu of parameters now proposes 2 options for keyframes operations such
    as set key, remove key or remove animation.
    It can operate on either 1 dimension at a time or all dimensions at the same time.

  Bug fixes:

• The tracker node now once again works on Windows.

  • Fixed a bug where color dialogs wouldn't refresh the color until the OK button was pressed
  • Fixed a bug where the bounding box of the image wasn't correct when using motion blur
    of the Transform node.
  • Fixed a bug where the bounding box of roto beziers wouldn't take the feather distance into
    account.
  • Fixed a bug where changing the number of panels in the property bin wouldn't have any effect
  • Fixed a bug where CImg channels parameter wouldn't be saved into the project

• The ColorLookUp node’s curve editor now properly gets keyboard focus

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.

Natron 1.0.0-RC1

This is Natron version 1.0.0 release candidate n°1.

Natron 1.0.0 RC n°1 changelog:

New ResizeOIIO node to reformat footage. It internally uses the OpenImageIO library and
offers numerous optimized filters. One should prefer Lanczos filter for downscaling and
Blackman-harris filter for upscaling.

New ColorMatrix node to apply a matrix to colors

New TextOIIO node to render some text. The node is not finished and you currently have
to set the name of a system font yourself. We will try to improve the node later on and propose
more options.

Rework of all the alpha premultiplication state of the workflow in Natron:

1. All readers now have a "Premultiplied" choice, that is automatically set to what's found
   in the image file header. However some images are badly encoded and say they are not
   premultiplied but in fact they are and vice versa. To overcome the issue, the user can
   still modify the parameter if it is obviously wrong.
   You can assume that READERS ALWAYS OUTPUT ALPHA PREMULTIPLIED IMAGES (or opaque)!

2. Writers have the same parameter and work kind of the same way: It detects what's the
   pre-multiplication state of the input-stream and set automatically the value it has found.
   However, again it can be wrong, so the user is free to modify the parameter.

3. Readers output pixel components can now be specified. They will be set by default when loading
   and image, but the user can control it.

Writers can now choose the format to render

New node-graph bird view, though you cannot interact with it yet.

New "turbo-mode" (button on top of the properties bin): when enabled nothing but the viewer
will be refreshed during playback for maximum efficiency. Mainly this overcomes the issue that
all parameters animation refresh can be expensive during playback.

New checkerboard mode for the viewer: when checked, everything transparent in the image
will have a checkerboard behind. This can enable you to better appreciate transparency.
You can control the color of the checkerboard and its size in Natron's preferences.

Project paths: The project can now have path variables that allows you to express
file paths relative to a variable instead of always using absolute file paths. This is
great for sharing work with others and/or moving image files safely.
By default there is always the variable [Project] that will be set to the location of
your project file (.ntp).

Project paths are to be used between brackets, e.g:

[MyPath]myImage.png

You can also express files in a relative manner to a variable, e.g:

[MyPath]../../Images/myImage.png

By default if you don't specify any project path but express the file in a relative manner,
it will be understood as being relative to the [Project] path.
For example, if [Project] is:
/Users/Me/Project/
Then
../Images/Pictures/img.png
would in fact expand to: /Users/Me/Images/Pictures/img.png
You can also have some project paths depending on other paths, e.g:
[Project] = /Users/Me/Project/
[Scene1] = [Project]Footage/Scene1/
[Shot1] = [Scene1]001/
If you're using project paths, be sure to use them at the start of the file-path and no
where else. For example
C:\Lalala[Images]Images.png would not be interpreted correctly.
Lastly, in the preferences of Natron there is an option in the General tab (disabled
by default) to auto-fix file paths when you change the content of a project path or the
variable name.
For example if you change
[Project] = /Users/Me/Project/
to
[Project] = /Users/Me/MySuperProject/
Then all file-paths that depended on this variable will be updated to point to the
correct location of the file.

File-paths are now "watched" by Natron: When a file changes outside of Natron, for example
because another software have overwritten it or modified it, Natron will be notified
and will reload the images.

New shortcuts editor: you can now customise the entire keyboard layout for the
application.

Caching has been improved and should now be more aware of your system capabilities. It
should strive for being as close possible to what the settings in the preferences are
set to. Note that it might still need some tweeking on some platforms
though because we're using system-dependents informations to make the Cache work.

You can now add control points/keyframes to curves by double-clicking on them. However, it
doesn't apply for the Roto beziers.

File dialog speed has been increased drastically

ReadFFMPEG: improve stability a lot

Parameters links and expressions are now displayed in the nodegraph (you can disable
them in the right click menu).

File Dialog: New preview viewer that allows you to visualise quickly what the selected
image file/sequence corresponds to.

Saving application's layout: You can now import/export the application's layout in the
Layout menu. You can also change the default layout by setting the parameter in the preferences
to point to a valid natron's layout file (.nl).

Node presets: You can now import/export node presets. You can then re-use any
configuration on any other project and share it with others.

The command line renderer is back! You can pass it a project filename in arguments
and render with it. For the final release we will also add the possibility to set a frame
range for a writer.

TrackerNode: more export modes: basically we added the possibility to export to a CornerPin
where the "to" points would be linked against the tracks. We also added a stabilise mode which is
in fact just a regular export to CornerPin with the "Invert" parameter of the CornerPin checked.

Undo/Redo support was added for restoring default parameters

The "link to..." dialog for parameters have been re-designed for a better user interface

The "Tab" menu to quickly create a node has been slightly adjusted: you can now type in
anything any word , e.g: "Blur" and it will propose all types of Blurs.

Value parameters can now have their increment based on where the mouse cursor is

New nodes menu icons were made by Jean Christophe Levet.

Natron 0.9.6

• Roto can now output RGBA colors and all beziers have a blending mode. It is now easier to layer your work within the same roto node.
• New Dot node to break connections and make cleaner graphs
• New OCIOCDLTransform to apply an ASC Color decision list, it also supports the .ccc (Color correction collection) or .cc (Color correction) file formats.
• New OCIOFileTransform to apply a transform from a given file. Supported formats:
• .3dl (flame or lustre)
• .ccc (color correction collection)
• .cc (color correction)
• .csp (cinespace)
• .lut (houdini)
• .itx (iridas_itx)
• .cube (iridas_cube)
• .look (iridas_look)
• .mga (pandora_mga)
• .m3d (pandora_m3d)
• .spi1d (spi1d)
• .spi3d (spi3d)
• .spimtx (spimtx)
• .cub (truelight)
• .vf (nukevf)
• Natron now includes Aces 0.7.1 OpenColorIO profiles
• Can now read multilayer/multiview images using ReadOIIO (the standard image reader plugin in Natron) for formats that support it (such as OpenEXR or Photoshop PSD). ReadOIIO now lets you select the layer/view/channel for each output component.
• Multiple nodes can now be selected/edited in the nodegraph at the same time. Hold CTRL-A to select all nodes, CTRL-SHIFT-A to select only visible nodes in the visible portion
• The “Tab” shortcut menu is now more intuitive and easy to use
• New shortcuts to create basic nodes:
  – O : Roto
  – C : ColorCorrect
  – G : Grade
  – T : Transform
  – M : Merge
• In addition the “L” shortcut allows you to rearrange automatically the layout of the selected nodes.
• New Tracker node: 4 different algorithms can be used to track points. Tracks can be created and controlled directly from the Viewer. You can then export the results in a CornerPin node. (Transform export will be included later).
• In addition for convenience you can also link the control points of the Roto splines directly to a given track.
  The tracker nodes accepts a mask in input: When tracking points inside a roto shape,
  plug that same shape as a mask of the tracker to help the tracker giving better results.
• The cache has been greatly improved so it is more clever with the usage of the memory and can be cleared totally using the menu option.
• The green-line on the timeline now has 2 different colours:
  • Dark green meaning that the frame is cached on the disk
  • Bright green meaning that the frame is present in memory (RAM)
    New tools icons in the interface (thanks to Jean Christophe Levet)
    Combobox (Choice) parameters now display in their tooltip the help for all the choices

so it is easier to understand the parameter than to cycle through all the list 1 by 1

• Fixed multiple bugs in the curve editor that prevented to select and move several keyframes
• Fixed a bug where some image sequences wouldn’t be recognised correctly
• Fixed stability of the software across the board
• Improved the efficiency of the rendering engine across the board, making it faster and more robust to some rare configurations
• Linux builds now offer a complete installer and maintenance tools allowing to install/uninstall/update the software easily (thanks to Ole Andre)
• Linux 32 bit platforms are now also officially supported.

Natron 0.9.5

This was shortly after 0.94 but we needed to deploy various fixes to the major bugs that were mainly
impairing usability of the software on Linux distributions.

This is a minor patch but it makes Natron much more stable than in 0.94.

Change log:

New setting in the preferences to allow Natron to only render once you finish
editing a parameter/slider/curve
New right click menu for roto splines/control points

The RGBLut node now has a master curve and an alpha curve

New shift-X shortcut on nodes to quickly switch their input A and B

The project loader is now more flexible and will still try load a project even if it
detects some incompatibilities or corrupted file.

Fixed a bug in the render engine which would cause a freeze of the application.

Fixed a bug where images from the cache wouldn't go away

Fixed multiple crashs on exit

Fixed compatibility with Qt4 on Linux (this bug was not Linux specific but only
noticed on this platform).

Fixed a bug with the colour parameters that would not provide to the plug-in the correct
values.

Fixed a bug in the Transform interact that would arise when the user would be zoomed in

Fixed a bug where the background renderer would crash

Improved performance in the refreshing of the graphical user interface of the parameters,
it should increase the performances of Natron across the board.

Natron 0.9.4

• Windows users are now proposed a regular installer and double clicking .ntp projects icons
  will now open them within Natron.
• New premult and unpremult nodes.
• The cache received some enhancements, as a result of it Natron should consume less memory.
  This should also speed up the rendering engine as a whole.
  Rendering complex graphs of 4K sequences should now almost always fit in the cache size limit
  and be faster.
• Nodes now have a color according to their role (Channel processing, Color processing, Filter,
  Merge, etc...)
• The roto points can now be moved with the keyboard arrows by a constant size depending
  on the viewport scale factor.
• The color picker on the viewer will now show pixel components according to the components
  present in the image being viewed.
• Added a setting in the preferences panel allowing to change the application's name as
  seen by the OpenFX plug-ins. This can help loading plug-ins that wouldn't load otherwise
  because they restrict their usage to specific applications.
• Invert/Transform/CornerPin/Merge nodes can now invert their mask
• Holding control while moving a backdrop now allows to move only the backdrop without moving
  the nodes within it.
• Connecting a viewer to the selected node using the 1,2,3,4... shortcuts will now select back the
  viewer afterwards so that the user doesn't have to deselect the node to switch quickly
  between inputs.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed preview images rendering
• Fixed a bug where the curves in the RGBLut plug-in would not allow to move the control points
  in more than 1 direction at a time.
• Fixed a crash that would occur when drag&dropping images within Natron. The same bug
  would also make Natron crash in some other cases.
• Fixed a bug where inverting alpha channel would not work
• Fixed bugs where timeline keyframe markers wouldn't reflect the actual keyframes
• Fixed the cache green line on the timeline so it is more in-line with what really is
  in the cache.
• Fixed a bug in the color correct node where the saturation would not be applied correctly
• Fixed a bug in the transform/corner pin nodes that wouldn't work when proxy mode would be
  activated.
• Fixed the ReadFFMPEG node as a whole, it should now work properly.
• We will enhance the WriteFFMPEG node in the future by adding presets so it is
  less complicated to handle all the parameters of that node.

Beta v0.9.3

Flag for version 0.93: upload new binaries.