Natron Tutorials Part 1: The basics of the Software Layout

hey youtube how's it going i made a video about the free open source compositing software called natron and a lot of people asked for some more in-depth tutorials about it so this is what this is going to be this is going to be the first episode in a mini-series on how to use it and in this series we're going to take this shot here this is the raw scan and we're going to turn it into this nothing too complex but there is a lot of commonly used compositing techniques going into this so there's two markers we're going to remove using different techniques and we're going to use a corner pin to track the text in and treat it like an element there and we're going to use the merge operations to do so so there is actually a decent amount of compositing technique there even though it is a very basic shot and by the end of the series you'll be able to make this exact shot and i'll make this footage available as well so if you go into the description below there'll be instructions on how you can download this exact plate so you can follow along to these tutorials exactly this part will be the most basic part where we just go over the software layout and how it actually works we won't do any actual compositing other than reading in the plate and changing the color space so that it's working the way we want so let's get into neutron okay so this is nitron this is how it opens with the default settings so we've got the three main areas here the viewer the node graph and the properties with the project settings opening by default we also have this menu down here which is the node menu it's a set of cascading menus that has all of the nodes that are available to us you don't actually need to use this at all all of these nodes like if i click on one for example it will bring in the node over here we can access all of these nodes with the tab menu if i hit tab and in with the mouse over the node graph and i can type for example the dspell we can get that node that way as well so i don't tend to use this unless i've forgotten the name of a node or i'm looking for what nodes are available that might fit what i want because these are split into categories for example this is the color menu so all the color orientated nodes will be in there there'll be a transform menu a keying menu etc we also have the file edit menu that all programs have up here so we'll use this right now to save the project i'll just save it in here call it comp save and done okay so i'll go over the properties well actually i'll start with a no graph and so i can get to the properties bin so the node graph is where everything in her shot lives all of the the movie files the elements the settings roto shapes everything lives and is saved in the note graph essentially the node graph is the file of your script so if we want to bring in an image let's do that now so we can either do that by just finding the image on disk like you normally would and then drag it in like most projects are capable of doing so for example here is our here is our plate so i can just drag this into the node graph like this and there it is it's brought in a node in this case a read node which has a file that looks at that that movie file on disk where we dragged it in from so if i delete the file from here it will this node will error and it won't it won't present the image so that's actually how natron and all these softwares really work as they read the file off disk they don't bring them into the project folder so this file does not live in the comp file that we made it still lives here and it's this file references this one so one small tip if you ever get into bigger scripts this little posted stamp here where it has an a small image of or thumbnail of the image this can slow down scripts uh so you can turn this off if you go into the node thing and turn off preview but it doesn't matter with the size of the script this one's going to be so it may have come in for you like this where it hasn't presented itself in the viewer here the way you connect this is either drag the one to the plate and drop it like that or with this selected and i hit one on the keyboard it will view the image up here if there's no viewer node selecting one will create one for you or you can use the tab menu as we just did before to make a viewer and click and drag just like that and it also by default will open up the properties here so this all of these settings live inside this node so the way i got that up was by double clicking or if you make a note it usually pops up in the properties by default so these are all the settings available to us for this image so here's the file we can change that by clicking this and finding another file we can change the frame range but it's all it should bring in all these settings for us so what i'm noticing first in the viewer is that the color space is wrong it's looking quite flat and washed out and that's because the color space coming in is nuke rec 709 but the file that is rendered is actually srgb and i happen to know this because i made it so if i go down to the color space section and i change this to srgb we should get a more accurate representation of what i want to see and it has so we can check all our settings all right 23 976 is the frame rate it's 40 frames long pre-molded file opaque i'll do a proper episode on pre-multiplication as part of the series as well because it's very important i can play the shutdown and natron isn't an image viewing software so it won't be very quick but no compositing software is very quick at displaying images some are probably faster than this if i let it cache all the way through it will play back a little bit quicker this is an interesting problem okay so if you get this error end of file issue that's probably caused because you're using something like a movie file format like an mov or mp4 or something like that a way to probably fix this would be to use an image sequence instead so i actually happen to have this as an image sequence and the difference between a movie file and an image sequence is um is all right here so this is a movie file if all of the frames that exist in this file exist in this file right here this one file an image sequence all of the frames are broken out like this so they're all still frames that live on disk so this is an exr sequence so i'm going to bring this in by going read navigating to the file and as you can see in this viewer it's um it's uh made the frames a hash number and made them all one file because it it knows that because these are frame zero zero one two three four five their sequence so i'm going to open this up and you can see it's true raw because it's an exr file natron's guessing that it's a linear file which again is incorrect so i'm going to change it to srgb and it's going to fix it up interestingly these still look a little bit different i can a b by hitting one on these and two and then i can with nothing selected can toggle between the two and you can see there is a difference like that so we can see we have the mov and the exr over here if i play the exr it shouldn't have that end of file issue let's see yep problem fixed so we'll discard the movie file and we'll work with the exr from now on which i recommend doing for all video files when um working on compositing software is using image sequences either an exr a png jpeg whatever your favorite is i prefer your exam so so we've gone over nodes and how they're a container for settings and changing some of the settings some key keyboard shortcuts would be b for blur would be g for grade we've gone over r for read the usual ones control a for control all control c and control v control s for save m for merge there'll be a detailed video on the merge node included in this series um so that one's an important one and those would be probably the main ones and one and the numbers for connecting the viewers to each other so if i want to toggle this node i can look above it but below it on two and then one and two with nothing selected it's very very picky about that nothing selected i can toggle between these two nodes another way to do that is if i'm looking at the blur node i can hit d for disable and toggle that cool so that's the very basic quick exam explanation of the no graph and the properties bin there is one extra thing when you open natron there will be a node open that isn't visible in here and it's not the viewer node it's the settings node the settings node is invisible node that you can't see but you can open by hitting s so it's this one here so this is the project setting so your resolution your frame rate frame range etc um nothing particularly unusual about these but once you set them and you save them and you close this they're set and you bring them up with yes there is also the natron user settings so where these settings are comp or shot specific saved in this file here there are user settings that will affect the way natron behaves so you do you get that up by hitting shift s and it will open this here i'm pretty sure you can get um you can probably do it this way preferences yeah edit preferences so and these aren't saved with the the natron file these are saved with uh your preferences as part of the software so um yeah you can go through and look at these i have all of these set to the default at the moment um except this one merge node connects to a input i disabled that so that when my merge nodes are created it's the b input that is connected i think that's the only thing i've changed obviously you can always just manually swap them around it's no biggie and the viewer um pretty self-explanatory this is your timeline and with your frames and you can play stop play and reverse skip to the end skip to the first frame one frame at a time this jumps to the nearest key frames keyframes show up as blue which there'll be a specific video on keyframes as well we will dive into that and this is an interesting one you can set your number here to skip that amount of frames so if i say 10 it will jump to 26 and back if ps this is the playback fps which you can then change so i can say play it back at 5 fps and it will play back in slow motion or you can play it back faster which is a pretty useful feature sometimes you can change this to time code if you want i don't like that i use frames this is how what happens when it gets to the end so at the moment it's set to loop you can set it to ping pong like that what else is there oh yeah just carry on playing but that's the end of the frame range so we'll just keep it on we'll keep it on the loop that's what i'm used to cool um middle click and drag will move the timeline over so if i'm zoomed in on the timeline so if i control zoom i can zoom in on the timeline and then middle click around if you have a long shot this might be a useful feature there's also in and out points which funnily enough the ino keyboard shortcuts don't work so you have to hit these and now we'll it will loop between just this section of the frame range all normal stuff um but good to know about nonetheless it seems left click fits the um viewer into place that's pretty useful i didn't know that i just figured that one out there should be a clear frame range in and out i'm not seeing what it is so i guess i can just manually fix those there and uh that'll do it that would be a good little bit of python to write if i can figure out the python api for this i'll make a video on it we also have the gamma and gain controls for the viewer now this doesn't actually do anything to the image in the comp it is just applied to what the viewer sees which is very useful feature for matching black levels checking exposure and things like that and if you just hit this button or revert back to the default and hitting it again will go back to your last setting so if i go down i can toggle on and off same here pretty useful and a bunch of um features you've got your area of interest window this will if you just want to look at a very particular section of the frame this will be a way to to speed up so now natron will only consider thinking about this part of the frame for the size of the script we're going to be working on we don't need to do that but for big scripts it can become very useful there is a proxy mode i've never never managed to get these proxy modes to work in these types of software but who knows maybe they are working this is probably the most useful button this will refresh the viewer so if it ever fails to draw the frame as you would expect you can try hitting this button and seeing if it fixes anything it's done it correctly here so nothing will happen and pause will just pause the viewer so if it's halfway through drawing a frame and it's taking a long time and you want to stop it you can hit pause or you can just disconnect the viewer pause will leave what is on what has been drawn on there as well it can get you um in a bit of trouble if you are trying to figure out why neutron isn't responding it could be just because the view is paused and this is an a b functionality so if i make a note out here and i blur a little bit so if i look at this you can see it's blurred and i have these two inputs selected and i change this to a wipe now we can wipe between these two inputs i can mix back between them i can rotate this this can be very useful for color correcting or just comparing images and stuff like that the shortcut key for that is w to toggle that as well by the way that's a good one because i keep i always go to toggle these and put my mouse up here and accidentally do it w cool that's probably enough i should mention as well the amazing customization of natron so if i click and drag these i can make natron look basically however i want the customization of these is of the software is very nice um for the purposes of this training series i'm going to use the default layout but you can obviously drag these onto multiple monitors and stuff like that and then surely you can save your layouts as you want them export them import them probably something like that i haven't actually done it because as i said i just use the default one so that'll just about do it for the basics of the layout i think so if you understand what i've explained here you'll be able to follow along with the rest of the series we'll get into these marker removals and applying the text and using the other compositing operations so i hope this was beneficial to some people stick around we'll go into actual detail on compositing techniques and how to actually make comps so yeah link will be at the end for the next in the series and uh have a good day hope you enjoyed [Music] cheers

Channel: Harry Chrisp

Views: 17,062

Keywords: Natron, Tutorial, How to, Natron Tutorial, Learn, Learn Natron, Compositing, Comp, Basics, Natron Basics, vfx, node based, easy to use, follow along, educational, compositing, natron tutorial, face cam, software, free software, free compositing software, open source, support, node graph, properties, viewer, nodes, settings, project settings, sections, How to use Natron

Id: nTApHhHr5LU

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020