Can we talk about the future

Hey guys I am curious to know about where natron was heading and if it is worthwhile pursuing.

I want to make some bold statements and throw some ideas around for long term goals of development for the future of Free Software.

Though I am kinda wanting people to know that I’m not wanting to hate on anyone. even though there are things about some software that I really don’t like.

ok thats it

Thanks heaps

Ad :grinning::grinning::grinning::grinning::grinning:

Currently Natron is in maintenance mode, as the developer who was writing code no longer has time to keep improving Natron at this time.

We have been putting out the word that developers are needed to move forward.

Someone else here on the forum is adding some features, but I haven’t seen anything come of that yet.

So how many devs were actually on natron. Because to be honest it kinda feels like it’s just fallen into the ocean because the dev got a better deal in life.

I know that this will sound unfair, but to not pass the flame on to more seems kinda not kool.

Is it worthwhile getting the developers back?

Or should we be looking for new blood?

Or should we just expand something like Blender that actually has more going for it and implements all the FX that Natron has?

Personally, I’m thinking about how can we take the best of everything that gets us to a really great place the fastest.

Also personally Nukes great, but there is a lot that could be expanded on so I don’t see any reason for deving out someone else’s mistakes because the software is popular (Sorry Steve Wright).

I think natron has its day along with nuke and we should be thinking much bigger than that.
I can’t help but feel that open source is the way to go.

Though we need to secure the life of it by creating a community that can access the dev. Blender seem to be doing this well.

Ad :smiley::smiley::smiley:

I have never had the time to try Natron. It seems to be fine as-is. From the discussion, there might not even be enough devs for maintenance mode, so I would say that we get there first before talking about any long term goals.

@Adam_Earle I haven’t been following your posts. What is your story? Would you happen to be a dev, tester and / or user?

I’m a dev in training but soon we maybe setting up another studio over seas (if all goes really well and the universe aligns).

If that happens we were looking at putting on devs for Natron but the more we look at this we kinda feel taking the best of everyone and trying to pack it into blender (I know that everyone loves nuke but can we get over it).

That said for us to do that we need to be making money from all of this as well just to organise all the devs and and set up a road map and training to make more devs as well as promotions is alot of time.

On top of all of that would be documentation and testing.

I think for natron we put down something like 8 devs to be working on natron and blender. Right now we are looking at opentoonz and what it has to offer.

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There would need to be someone to “pass the flame on to” first. Those developers haven’t shown up yet. The main Natron developer is around and is totally willing to answer questions. His time is limited though. Previously development was sponsored, you can read more here.

It’d pretty much have to be a paid gig.

Yes, we should be looking for new devs.

Yes but that community was not easy to build and has taken years and years.

That sounds good, but is probably a ton of work.

This is an animation application and not really the same as Natron or Blender. Its workflow is geared towards scanning drawings and animating from that.

Thanks for the answers and the blog.
Seems look like our thinking tends to line up in some areas

About to spend the last of today talking about it.

If anyone else wants to chime in over the weekend that would be great to have more than my 20 years of experience I’m just one guy.

So I would say speak and be heard.

Ad :heart_eyes::heart_eyes::heart_eyes::heart_eyes:

should we just ask https://www.inria.fr/en/ for the code of Natron 3? It worth a shot right? or has some done that already? Is the code somewhere online?

Ad :smiling_face_with_three_hearts::smiling_face_with_three_hearts::smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

@Adam_Earle check out Olive Editor. It’s a new NLE that already uses OCIO for color management. It obviously doesn’t have nodes or Nuke style compositing. It’s also based heavily on GLSL shaders, and has a streamlined modern design.

Any discussion about GPL NLE’s / compositors has to include fundamental image processing pipelines. It’s not enough to copy the look of great proprietary software, it also needs to work- get the job done.

With a bit of investment I can see Olive being very successful not only for the creator, but also users.

Olivevideoeditor.org

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I am not quite sure what you mean by asking for the code - it’s open source. Also it seems you aren’t quite up-to-date, e.g. as far as I know inria isn’t involved anymore. I suggest you have a look at Natron development status? and Crowdfunding Natron 3d Workspace, possibly GUI overhaul with QT 5.12 - #11 by razorsharp as it would probably the most pressing issue if Natron was continued on it’s own (as opposed to e.g. your Blender integration idea), as qt4 reached end-of-life.

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The Natron 3 code is in the branch called “master” on github, but it has serious bugs. You can try it, though

CY2020 Draft
https://vfxplatform.com/

Includes the long-awaited move to Python 3, And QT 5.12 :blush:

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Hi,

Recently I’ve needed something like AE… but on GNU/Linux and opensource (what else?!)
I’ve found Natron by using https://alternativeto.net/
It looks very promising, but… I’ve seen this huge banner “Maintainer Needed” :open_mouth:
I’ve take a look to the git repo and tried to build it myself on my Fedora 29.
That was not easy at first time (I’ve been terrified by the SDK installation script and all these patches…), to finally don’t build SDK at all and just use a simple Docker base image.
My binary is now successfully build, and as I really need this application, I can officially give a bit of my time to help for maintenance and dev.

Fast resume: I’m a senior software developer in Embeedded SW, specialized in GNU/Linux and OpenSource technologies. I’m doing kernel driver, SW design, projects management, dev-ops, etc for various industrial customers.
I’ve also ported Python and Blender (in early 2000’) on a non-POSIX platform, PowerPC based.

I’ve got a bit of free time each day during the next couple of months, so if I can help, it’ll be a pleasure. For sure, I’m not a Windows or MacOS developer, but I’ve some contacts that may be interested by :wink:

I’ve take a look to the Issues list on github (I’ve replied for the timeline bar issue with GCC8.1).
But my first notice is to cleanup the build system in general and dependencies, at least for GNU/Linux based platforms. It looks like a nightmare to maintain.

Cheers

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@yomgui welcome and that sounds like a great plan!

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@yomgui
sounds cool

If some people has free cpu time for me to test binaries and/or build systems, let me know in PM what kind of system you have (only GNU/Linux for now, sorry for Win/Mac, as I’ve said I’m not a dev on these platforms)

@yomgui
CentOS 7.5, XEON E5640, 32 GB RAM

This is an easy one… I’m familiar with Redhat base stuff (also with Ubuntu in fact).
But I’m looking for ArchLinux users (to make the deps list and know what to put into the dockerfile)

Sorry i only use CentOS & i have no experience with Docker.

@yomgui if you could contribute a docker image with the SDK that would be great. Some of the patches are needed, especially the Qt4 patches. Ideally, this should be a docker image based on centos6.