Hi, I found out that udemy released a new tutorial for Natron (https://www.udemy.com/natron-for-beginners/). New tutorial may create new natron users, so in a way it’s a good new.
Theres a playlist on youtube called nuke 101. It was made for nuke x. I’m planning to make one for natron. I’m going to cover everything in that series. I cant record anything soon, as there’s a lot of chaos in the house… Omar had also asked me to make a tutorial for Prism and natron, which is also planned… Just waiting to be recorded… I’ll do it asap… The series will take some time…
cool, realy cool. Thx a lot for doing that
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Hello! Brand new here…Thanks to Indie Rebel I’m getting better at Natron… But I’m still very vague on the dope sheet. But getting there. THANKS Chris! You’re awesome! Trying desperately to get away from After effects and having to use windows and mac. Can anyone please tell me that NAtron has not been abandoned? Is Natron still evolving?
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Hi, and welcome to the forum.
Natron is still maintained, but don’t expect any major features/changes anytime soon.
Hi Artisto
Great choice to come to Natron!
I switched from OSX/Adobe/Maya/Fusion to Ubuntu/Natron/Blender/Krita/Gimp.
The first few months where quite hard but now my workflow is much faster than ever before and can not imaging to switch back… hope you have the nerves to jump into it!
Hi everyone! I was just reading up on the posts and I just wanted to say how nice it was to get such a warm welcome! Thank you!
I can’t believe its been that long since I joined this forum. But I was checking around today hoping to come across some new news about Natron and maybe seeing some upgrades and or improvements. Sadly for a bit, I had to turn back to After Effects to get some of my video projects (homemovies) fixed. There aren’t very many tutorials on Natron and I have watched many Nuke tutorials but its not always the same in key details to then turn back to Natron and expect the same functions.
Also, as bad as it sounds, I got real frustrated with trying to use GIMP and gave up causding me to turn back to adobe for speedy work since I’m already fluent there. Thankfully, there is a better and newer version of GIMP out now. -Yes, I tried to learn Krita but its difficult for me to adjust to learning something new while I have little time to work with my home projects.
But enough of this long post. Hope to hear from someone soon. Thanks for being so welcoming! God bless !
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@Artsito
There is this project which you want to solve on your new Linux setup.
After 10 minutes you miss Photoshop and Aftereffects, after 2 hours you loose your nerves and switch to your old known workflow on Win/Osx, job in 30minutes done.
If it is like this, you will never make the change, I know that feeling very well.
Give yourself at least a month or two to build a completely new workflow, learn new tools, realize that there exist 1000 of scripts and plugins to solve things you need… that Blender has amazing tools, combined with Natron you can do a hell lot, that Gimp (get it here: Release Continuous · aferrero2707/gimp-appimage · GitHub) is quite good and Krita has similar shortcuts to Photoshop.
After a year or so, you will use your VM-Windows only to convert proprietary Adobe files from your clients… the rest you will be able to solve on Linux 
Please forgive me if this is the wrong place to post but I also wanted to reply to the last…
I completely agree with that last assessment of my situation. I acknowledge wholeheartedly that nothing is gained without the pain of learning and experimenting. I have to admit, that I have been a bit discouraged because there just isn’t enough tutorials to help me through as there is with the more mainstream Adobe apps. I have asked for help with Natron and there just isn’t the support. There just aren’t sufficient tutorials. When I have asked for help, there just hasn’t been much or the delay in obtaining an answer is itself [un-motivating] as that the passage of time creates a growing sense of stagnation and then suddenly, a rushing need.
So in the last few days, I decided to try again with Natron. I have asked for help on this same project before but here it is again.
I tried some different arrangements but this is the only one that appears to work but it doesn’t seem correct to me for some reason. I tried to stabilize the footage in order to make it easy to mask around the subjects ( the kids) in order to blur out the background and give the background a camera blur effect. I needed the mask to be animated with the footage and to follow the subjects to achieve this.
I would like to avoid duplicating the read node -in After Effects, one would duplicate the footage and add the effect to the under layer while having masked out the top layer. How can I do this from this step forward maybe so that its correctly done with nodes? Please, anyone!
@Artisto:
i completely agree with you that the whole Masking/Alpha stuff is way too complicated, still struggling after months of Natron usage…
However, try it with this tut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XxCc2mjS8g (its in french, but you get what to click).
Tried with a a single pic and I think its what you need:
Btw, there is another VFX tool on Linux you might like:
To be honest, stuff like this tracking and blur, I currently solve in a proprietary software called DaVinci Resolve, which kind of works on Linux, but has no official support when you are on Ubuntu.
More and more I do everything in Blender, see this tut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQtg1AoE1xk
Blender is getting more powerful every week and I guess in a few months I’ll also do all the video/vfx stuff in there…
Feel free to ask to get some inputs while switching your creative workflow to Linux.
It took me quite a while to be able to solve all the stuff in there.
Best thing is that when you report a bug or ask a question, the dev himself will help you. Its just a completely other world…
Thank you so much for the reply and your input. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.
I couldn’t find anything on youtube about enve. I did watch the french tutorial and it did help a bit. But I have spent all night here trying different arrangements on trying to add a special effect to the background of this stabilized footage with a roto mask that moves along with the point of stabilization while keeping the foreground in focus. The only time I could achieve this once was to duplicate the read node but my understanding so far is that duplicating is not needed. Oh boy…gonna keep trying I guess. It’s like trying to guess the code numbers to a lock.
You don’t need to duplicate the read node, you can just drag another “cable” from the one you have… use merge nodes, fiddling with alpha: Merge / Viewer / Writer Node issue with Operation Modes · Issue #455 · NatronGitHub/Natron · GitHub
Here you will find some more info about enve:
you could also share your comp for download and ask for help here or on the discord channel…
UPDATE: Good news, that french tutorial got me even closer…not sure why I had other glaring issues when I was trying to mimic it. I think i was coming across some bugs on my Natron version. About half way there maybe!!!
…Oh boy, Well I found this NUKE tutorial on you tube and this is exactly what I would like to do. But its been way too intimidating and a bit messy for me to follow. The link is :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf1s2E5mkwI
Here is another screen shot: If anyone one has a redirected link to the proper forum under title, please kindly direct me. I know the title here isn’t appropriate and the topic is way off…
@Artsito, @magdesign Compositor here! I think I have the solution to your masking woes.
Typically in Nuke I like to make a toolset (I don’t think Natron has this feature) which I call HW_Roto. To be clear I’m absolutely not the inventor of this method or anything (it’s a very standard way of working with masks) but that’s what I call most of my toolsets which are just workflow tweaks.
In any case, here’s what it looks like recreated in Natron.
What’s going on here is the proper way of working with masks from a workflow standpoint, we separate our process into two pipes, one where we create our mask in the alpha channel and then we bring that alpha back over to our RGB pipe and premult it. The first shuffle node takes away any alphas that may already exist (note that you shouldn’t have any to begin with and if you are already working on a pre-multiplied image you should work on your masks further up in your comp to avoid double-premulting), then we have our roto node where we create our rotos, I also like to include a blur with this as most of the time I like to soften masks with a 2px blur instead of fiddling around in the roto node, then the alpha goes back into our RGB pipe where we pre-multiply it so things actually become transparent.
In this example we have a yellow constant that is fed through HW_Roto, a masked out shape and a stroke in our roto node which is then blurred, and we are left with the result in the viewer, neat!
Here’s the script for the toolset, copy and paste it into your Natron window and it should work as expected. You can use this to mask out the kids and then merge the pre-multiplied output of this toolset overtop a defocused background. Keep in mind that results may vary… defocusing things in post is tricky to make look good.
hwroto.txt (22.0 KB)
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Haha, wow…this is serious stuff. Intimidating too. hahaha-excited though! I’m gonna play around with it to see how I can get a grasp of it. THANK YOU SO MUCH!
Well, upon returning to my project as is as I showed up there, I can’t seem to be able to get the footage to move with the tracked mask and also have those effects applied. This is what drives me insane about Natron. There doesn’t sem to be a rhyme or reason as to what order the effects will work in the way you expect.
HAAAA SUCCESS!!!
After painful experimentation ( i bring my project computer to work with me and it has no internet connection ) on how to make the cable connections, its finally worked. Here is the arrangement :
Thanks for this script!
Its sooo complicated to make a simple mask (even which option to select e.g. multiply, atop…),
the script helps but its still freaks me out and I guess its an important deal breaker for most newcomers.
Wondering why there is no simple function to add a mask ?
BTW.
After adding a mask (which occurs as expected) I added a ChromaKey and suddenly lost the masks alpha channel… what am I doing wrong?
fig.1: added roto for masking, result as expected.
fig.2: added a chroma key, the alpha information from the roto is somehow lost.
I think its a Linux related bug:
made a tutorial for masking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEEdGQLVnxk
but the green screen thing is still not really solved, ended up with rendering out the whole thing 2x, first time with the green screen applied, then doing the masking stuff… 
a few hours later, masking the simple way (thanks to @Shrinks99):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H947uhij76o
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the videos are on peertube_