Natron
Natron is a free, open-source (GPLv2 license) video compositor, similar in functionality to Adobe After Effects, Foundry's Nuke, or Blackmagic Fusion. This fork targets Linux only, and is built with Qt 6.8, C++20, and CMake.
Help wanted
Natron is looking for developers and maintainers! You can help develop and maintain Natron if you have the following skills:
For more information, see the "Contributing" section below.
If you are willing to help, please contact the development team on the pixls.us Natron forum.
Features
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32-bit floating-point linear color processing pipeline.
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Color management handled by OpenColorIO.
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Dozens of video and image formats supported such as: H264, DNxHR, EXR, DPX, TIFF, JPG, PNG through OpenImageIO and FFmpeg.
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Support for many free, open-source, and commercial OpenFX plugins—currently almost all features of OpenFX v1.4 are supported. Those marked with (+) are built by this fork's CI from pinned source.
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Intuitive user interface: Natron aims not to break habits by providing an intuitive and familiar user interface. It is possible to customize and separate the graphical user interface on any number of screens. You can re-use your layouts and share your layout files (.nl).
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Performance: In Natron, anything you do produces real-time feedback in the viewer thanks to the optimized multi-threaded rendering pipeline and support for proxy rendering (computing at a lower resolution to speed up rendering).
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Multi-task: Natron can render multiple graphs at the same time. It can also be used as a background process in headless mode.
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Recover easily from bugs: Natron's auto-save system detects inactivity and saves your work for yourself. Natron is also able to render frames in a separate process, meaning that any crash in the main application would not crash the ongoing render (and the other way around).
Requirements
A machine running Linux, with a 64-bit x86-64 processor.
An OpenGL 2.0 compatible graphics card is needed to run Natron (2.1+) with hardware-accelerated rendering. Other graphics cards work with software-only rendering (see below).
The following graphics cards are supported for hardware-accelerated rendering:
- Intel GMA 3150
- Intel GMA X3xxx
- Intel GMA X4xxx
- Intel HD (Ironlake)
- Intel HD 2000/3000 (Sandy Bridge)
- Intel HD 4000 and greater
- Nvidia GeForce 6 series and greater
- Nvidia Quadro FX and greater
- Nvidia Quadro NVS 285 and greater
- ATI/AMD Radeon R300 and greater
- ATI/AMD FireGL T2-64 and greater (FirePro)
You can enable software rendering by setting the environment variable LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 before running Natron.
Installing
Binary distribution
Pre-built Linux release artifacts (AppImage and tarball) are published on the Releases page. See INSTALL_LINUX.md for which artifact to pick, system requirements, and known limitations.
You can also build Natron from source (see below).
Building and installing from source
There are instructions for building Natron and the basic plugins from source in this directory, on Linux:
This documentation may be slightly outdated, so do not hesitate to submit updated build instructions.
Contributing
Low hanging fruits
You should start contributing to the Natron project by first picking an easy task, and then gradually taking more difficult tasks. Here are a few sample tasks, by order of difficulty (from 0 to 10):
- 2: Pyplugs, Shadertoy scripts (there are still developers for these, see https://github.com/NatronGitHub/natron-plugins )
- 4: Write an OpenFX plugin, starting from an example in openfx-misc or from the official OpenFX examples, for example try to make an OpenFX plugin from a widely-used PyPlug. There are a few OFX plugin developers in the community.
- 5: Build Natron locally
- 7: Compile a redistributable Natron binary using the build scripts in
tools/ci/local/
- 9: Fix a simple Natron bug
- 10: Add new functionality to Natron (see issues)
Logistics
We coordinate development through the GitHub issue tracker.
The default branch is main, and pull requests are opened against it. RB-2.6 and the other RB-*/legacy branches (including master) are frozen upstream history, not merge targets — see CONTRIBUTING.md for the full branching model and the upstream bridge to NatronGitHub/Natron.
Feel free to report bugs, discuss tasks, or pick up work on the issue tracker. If you want to make changes, please fork, edit, and send us a pull request against main.
The repository includes a git pre-commit hook that auto-formats staged C/C++ changes with the pinned clang-format==21.1.8 (the same tool and version CI uses). To install it, run:
tools/install-git-hooks.sh
This links the hook idempotently into .git/hooks/pre-commit. The hook reformats staged C/C++ lines and re-stages the result, letting the commit proceed. It only refuses commits when the pinned clang-format==21.1.8 is missing, or when a file to be reformatted has unstaged hunks (asking you to stage or stash them rather than risk including unrelated edits). Install the tool with:
pip install --user --break-system-packages clang-format==21.1.8
The same clang-format check runs automatically on changed lines by the format CI job, so the hook ensures a commit never reaches CI unformatted.
