Creating a Natron/KDEnlive space animation.
Had some downtime and wanted to give Natron a try. It has always ran like shit on the Linux distributions I run so I don’t think I’d use it for big projects but for small clips, like maybe subscribe buttons, it works great. I just hope someone picks up the development again, because I like the workflow.
Difference between Natron and KDEnlive
This is a very short clip to test Natron on my arch build. It works fine other than rendering, it is dog slow. KDEnlive is actually using hardware to render so it doesn’t kill resources and renders fairly quick in comparison. Natron on the other hand pushes my RAM and CPUs to max. In order to speed Natron up I decided to only focus on the lens flare, earth, and starfield animations and add color correction and ship image in KDEnlive.
I am not going to walk you through the process here. You can download all the files used to see how it all works. It includes the animated title project, the earth project for both KDEnlive and Natron. You will need to remap the assets (video clips, images, and music) as they are pointing to paths on my machine. I use the title clip from this tutorial I made recently in KDEnlive and Krita. Animating in Natron is easy and there are tons of examples on YouTube. The gist is you right click in the transition properties, set key, move the time to end point and rotate, move, or resize.
I used the ship console from here. I did not use the animated one, which would have looked a lot cooler. The music is by Dox and can be found here.
IMPORTANT: To get the lens flare in Natron you will need to install the Community plug-ins.
Download the KDEnlive and Natron projects and assets here. These three projects were used to make the following. I use OBS to capture my screen.
I do realize Natron is no longer developed so here is a similar project in Blender 2.9. Yeah, I need to practice.