Open Source Compositing Software for VFX and Motion Graphics | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Compositing Software for VFX and Motion Graphics

natrongithub.github.io

103 pointsmarcodiego13 comments

Unfortionately, in a failed attempt to commercialize Natron, the original developers relicensed from Apache to GPL.

I think this killed the chances of any big studios or companies getting involved with development.

Blender relicened it's renderer Cycles to Apache to encourage commercial adoption. I think Natron should have stuck to this approach.

You're probably correct. GPL is (unreasonably) radioactive to many companies.

IIRC, it was the lead developer who implemented the original prototype in his own time who decided the license, not the Blender project. I don't think Cycles was ever GPL as it was developed as a standalone project that could be integrated into Blender rather than an integrated renderer that was split out.

It's frustrating that AFAIK the FLOSS choices are Blender (compositor is robust but has severe limitations and is really, really slow) and Natron (more featureful and faster but crashes if you look at it wrong).

Davinci Resolve has Fusion built in, which is good and runs on Linux but it isn't FLOSS and I think has some limitations in the free version.

AFAIK the only limitation on Fusion in Resolve is that resolution is limited to Ultra HD (no DCI 4K), just like in the rest of the free Resolve version.

There's also some nodes that only work on the paid version (or add a watermark if you try to use them) and there might be restrictions on using OpenFX plugins.

IMO, Resolve Studio is pretty reasonably priced considering that version upgrades have been free for many years (unlike Adobe and others which cost hundreds annually), but it's not FOSS and there's still people for which a $300 one-time purchase might be too much.

First time hearing about this, though the similarity to Nuke is uncanny. I'm happy to see OpenFX getting treated as a first class citizen and not be relegated to be the unwanted child of a bigger compositor.

Definetly gonna try it out.

It’s a free Nuke clone. The similarity is intentional!

Considering Nuke is by far and above the industry standard that is probably a good thing

This has been posted a few times now, and while it definitely looks very cool I've not yet heard of people actually doing significant work with it (compared to other open source alternatives such as, say, Blender). Curious to hear about people's experiences with it.

Still planar tracking only (no motion tracking/solving), so no alternative to Blender (and every other 'real' 3D Compositor).

The last time I tried it, it was so unstable that it was beyond unusable.

It wouldn't stay open for more than half a minute even if you did nothing.

If you did anything it was an instant crash. I'm not sure how anyone calls something like that a 'release' version. I'm not sure I've ever even left software in that state, let alone committed it and let alone actually letting other people run it.

I recently tried Natron. I work on Linux/wayland. It was constantly crashing on me, I rebooted to Windows and tried the Windows version, it was crashing, and it was getting stuck a lot.

IMO Blender can do the same job and do it better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com