Which is is the best suited video import format for Natron 2.3.14/Windows?

Software Natron
1

Hi there,

I am an new to Natron and really excited. One thing that turned out as a problem right in the beginning were glitches (in the read node?) while writing/exporting the video. When writing my my project (split screen of 4 input videos) I always get corrupted or frozen frames. I first tried with mp4/h264 from my Canon camera: mpeg block corruption artifacts in the result, In my second attemt, mkv/huffyuv skipped several random frames in two of the four videos,

My question is: What is is the ideal video format (container and video/audio codecs) for Natron?

Thanks,
Alessandro

1 Like
2

Some codecs dont work well with natron…
Best practice would be to convert the footage into a high quality image sequence and then import the sequence into natron.

3

Check the “common workarounds” section of this post.

10

Best you convert your video footage to a .png image sequence as El_Artista already mentioned.

I would use FFMPEG to do it on the command line: ffmpeg -i input.mov output_%04d.png

There are also some GUI tools like VLC, check this post: https://www.raymond.cc/blog/extract-video-frames-to-images-using-vlc-media-player/

After a few weeks you will figure out how great it is to work with image sequences, even for rendering out your comp since you can continue failed renders on the image number where it failed.

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11

I agree with @magdesign.
In the Writer node properties panel, there is even an “Overwrite” check box, which is checked by default. If a render fails, just uncheck it and relaunch the full render, it will only render the missing frames.
Be careful though: I am not sure your ffmpeg command will produce 16 bits png if the input video is 10 bits or more. I would prefer dpx or exr frames for that purpose.

1 Like