Golden opportunity for Serif to have "Affinity Effects" Natron

[All Media Lab]

Hi,

Natron on Github

Quote

Natron is looking for developers and maintainers. You can help developing and maintaining Natron if you have the following skills:

• Git and GitHub
• C++ (Natron source is still C++98, but switching to C++11 or C++14 should be straightforward if needed)
• Design patterns
• Qt (Natron still uses Qt4 because of the lack of PySide support in Qt5, which should be integrated shortly after Qt 5.12 is released)
• Basic knowledge of OpenGL
• Basic knowledge of Python

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.

Now that Natron (the opensource competitor of Adobe After Effects and Nuke) seeks for developers and maintainers to continue this project it is a golden opportunity for Serif to get their own "After Effects/Nuke" application in hands. This is a mature super sophisticated application absolutely not in beta phase. What do you say Serif?

Regards,

David  

[thomasp]

Isn't it a pretty straight rip of Nuke on the surface? Perhaps it can get away with this as an open source tool but I imagine as soon as a company steps in to develop a commercial product it will turn into a lengthy legal affair.

Also when I tried it it was rather slow. Probably a lot of optimization needed for the critical nodes before it has any chance of competing with Nuke, Fusion and whatever else may be out there.

Lastly that is one complex field of applications all on its own - and one with very established products, some offered for free even - does a company really want to step into that market when its solutions for 2D/vector-art should keep it pretty busy for a good while, not to mention its recent developments in the DTP field? How large is the developer army over at Serif anyway?

[Dean Reardon]

While node based editing offers a lot of customization, I am not sure it will really catch on with the standard consumer. Heck, even a lot of motion graphics/video editors prefer AE over something like Davinci. Nonetheless, it's nice to see other options out there.

I would like to see Serif work with another English/England based video company like HitFilm and enable use of native Affinity files with layering straight into HitFilm. I think that would benefit both companies. Users of Hitfilm have probably opted for HitFilm over paying for the Adobe subscription and thus don't have or use Illustrator or Photoshop...but they may be more apt to use something like Affinity.

[myclay]

GPL licenced code is probably not interesting for Serif to use. With the current GPLed licence, Serif would have to restructure their entire business model. https://github.com/NatronGitHub/Natron/blob/RB-2.3/LICENSE.txt

The .afphoto file format is for everyone outside Serif more secret and undocumented than psd files and Serif stated there is no intention to change that.
Without adding an intermediate filechanging capability, it wouldn`t make sense to see Serif resurrect Natron.

It makes imo currently no sense at all - Serif and customer wise to see Serif "have" Natron in its current state unless all developers who contributed to Natron agree to relicencing.