Natron: Open source video compositing

I often use my desktop computer to edit family videos. I'm far from being en expert or even en advanced amateur, my needs usually are limited to cutting out bed scenes, stitching the good ones with some effect and, sometimes, add head titles and a little of music. I usually use OpenShot for video editing and AviDemux in case my source video needed some simple processing before editing. These tools are more than enough for my limited needs but, while browsing around into the Internet, I read about a tool that appeared very promising to me: Natron, I so decided to install it and give it a try.

What Natron is

Natron is a compositing software. Its main function is mixing together different sources: video, pictures and text with addition of various filters and effects. Let's also point out what Natron is not: Natron isn't an editing software. Natron is not suited in cutting and stitching videos together even though, reading community forums, I understand it isn't impossible using it that way.

Natron user interface

Natron is a “node based” compositing software, the process applied to source video is graphically described by a graph where every node represent an elaboration step like, for example, an effect or a filter. May be it’s because I’m very “graph-minded” because of my work, but I felt at home with Natron suer interface from the very beginning. I started by trying to correct a very dark and noisy night scene:

Video editing on Linux: Lightworks

I often use my desktop computer for editing family videos even if I do this at a very amateur level. Wile I mostly produce “animated slide-show” videos, every now and then I adventure into the “real” video editing field. Until now I used OpenShot: I appreciate mostly its clean and easy to use user interface. Unfortunately, with my current desktop configuration, OpenShot appears to e quite unstable crashing without any clue especially before video preview.

I so decided to explore the panorama of available Linux video editing in order to find a proper replacement to OpenShot

Lightworks is one of the video editing software that received many positive reviews among many blogs I visited so I decided to give it a try.

Lighworks

Lightworks is a closed source software, both a free and a payment version are available, but limitations on the free version don't prevent you from a amateur level use. I so downloaded the “.deb” installation package and installed it by just double-clicking on the installation file.

Registration

When you download Lightworks you are asked to log-in or register to Lightworks site. Registration, which is free, is not mandatory to download the file but it is mandatory to activate and start the program.

OpenShot for video editing

Editing home videos is one of the activities I use my desktop computer for. I'm still using some Windows program to di this but I'm continuously looking for the definitive Linux program to solve my problems.

I first read about OpenShot in this post of Gabuntu blog. I so decided to try it even the program is still in a development phase (version 0.9.22).

Installation

OpenShot is available as .deb package, I downloaded them from OpenShot's download page. The files needed are two: OpenShot main package and a dependency archive containing the packages required by OpenShot installation. I also downloaded the optional Italian language package. I so extracted the dependencies package and installed them all as follows: