Natron has the fasted renderer out there

Due to various reasons I am coming back to Natron.
However, I made a render speed comparison between all node based composting tools:
https://youtu.be/fJpEfjcA2cY

Natron is amazing fast compared to the others!!!
@Frédéric Devernay: you are a genius, its the first time in my life I can work nearly realtime on animaton

But I am spending too much time figuring out why sometimes the .png sequence has not the same color as displayed in the viewer, why comp fails to render at all and why sometimes all renders are green… Any tricks and recommendations on this?

2 Likes

One very important step is to use a DiskCache Node and cache everything before rendering.

Be aware that Natron fills your harddrive extremely fast!!
I mounted a second harddrive and symlinked the /home/username/.cache folder to this drive.

1 Like

Isn’t it standard as a compositor to have a separate disk just for caches? :stuck_out_tongue:

Maybe :relaxed:

The thing is that Natron renders extremely fast, but I can not walk away since it crashes often.
Would be nice to have something like a rendermanager which renders all the comps and if it fails, it starts rendering again at the frame where it disappeard.
Do you never have crashes ?

1 Like

Do you have a project I can test where you have rendering issues?

I do have some scenes where Natron crashed while rendering (either in the viewer or during the Write process) but I can’t send them to you because they’re commercial projects and I signed agreements that prevent me from sharing the files.
But I can tell that most of the time, rendering to image sequences reduced the chances of having a crash significantly…

Though I have to say I don’t have a lot of projects where Natron crashed… There are only some. I think most of the times Natron has crashed, it’s because of my mistakes or the use of a community plugin that might be unstable. Regardless, Natron sure needs some fixes in the renderer.

I don’t recommend using video as input or output.

If you are able to create a simple project that crashes please send it to me

I also like the idea of having a render manager.
I’m going to contact Richard Frangenberg, the creator of Prism-Pipeline and Pandora render manager, and ask him whether there are any plans for a Natron and Nuke integration.
I’ve been using Pandora with Blender for a while and I think its good. It’d be great if it works with Natron and Nuke in the future.

A simple project won’t crash for me. Natron never crashed while doing simple stuff. It only crashes when there is a complex and heavy file. High resolutions, a lot of read nodes (even image sequences), using multiple nodes that need high performance power, etc are some situations where Natron struggles or crashes. But Natron doesn’t crash very often.

Same here, only on big comps with a lot of image sequences.
What helps is rebooting the computer.

Prism pipeline looks interesting!

Never use videos in node based comp software… always image sequences.
Btw. When I drag’n’drop a .jpg in Natron, it disappears immediately…

1 Like

We could enable crash reporting again …

1 Like

That would be great… but it would only be useful if people actually took the effort to use it and report crashes…

And that’s the reports I want :wink: The more info we get from the user the better

The existing solution will popup a dialog offering to send a report when Natron crashes. We could also modify this process.

1 Like

Crash reporting sounds great!
But will this work when Natron just disappears ?

I am working on a project for the next few weeks for which I will use Natron a lot.
(Still checking if I can send you a project, but its a hell lot of files…).

Especially the crashes when DiskCashing or Rendering are important to fix.
Also willing to donate and to promote Natron, the rendering speed is just amazing on a Threadripper :slight_smile:

(coming from BMD Fusion, its soooo slow and the support is s***, figured out that Natron does not need a 3d workspace at all, we have Blender and the two work great together…).

1 Like

The current implementation will not work without a server. I’m working on a local crash system.

It might be easier to get the crash reporting working. I got the server side working already and I have tested reporting on Linux and Windows (I don’t think we can enable on Mac anymore?). We need to enable building of the crash reporter again, update server url and collect symbol files.

Sounds great.
Using Ubuntu “Pop!_OS” 18.04 LTS
here.
Would also be ok to start Natron with some kind of wrapper script which makes logs

Natron custom build with crash reporting:

Note that this is a bit hackish as the build system created a broken CrashReporter (does not detect Natron-bin crashes), so you will need to apply a “patch”.

wget https://github.com/rodlie/Natron/releases/download/crashtest01/Natron-crash-201912080826-432aef9-64-no-installer.tar.xz
wget https://github.com/rodlie/Natron/releases/download/crashtest01/NatronCrashReporter-glibc223-gcc55.gz
tar xvf Natron-crash-201912080826-432aef9-64-no-installer.tar.xz
zcat NatronCrashReporter-glibc223-gcc55.gz > Natron-crash-201912080826-432aef9-64-no-installer/bin/Natron
./Natron-crash-201912080826-432aef9-64-no-installer/Natron

Basically extract Natron to FOLDER and overwrite FOLDER/bin/Natron. When Natron crashes you will get a dialog.

1 Like

Great!
Just installed your version and forced Natron to crash while simply importing a .jpg file into a read node (I think messed up the words read and write in crash report).

Thank you so much for diving into Natron’s code.

Are you sure the report was sent? I don’t see any new report. On success you will get a unique ID back from the server.

You can go into settings and trigger a test crash just to see if it works.