Director
For a long time this page said an animation editor was what we were building next. It is built. The Director takes the fractals you have already composed, puts them on a clock, and works out everything in between — the slow descents and the color cycles people used to do by hand, laid out and rendered at the size you need.
The Director. The film and its render controls at the top left, the preview at the top right, and the key frames in a row underneath — open a stretch between two of them and the frames in the middle appear, with the channel bands under them.
Key frames
There is no separate animation mode and nothing new to learn. You compose in the live view exactly as you always do — dive somewhere, recolor it, turn a texture on — and then press Use current view. That state, all of it, becomes a stop on the clock. Compose another and press it again.
Every key frame carries two arrows that move it one place earlier or later — dimmed where there is nowhere to go — and every one but the first a second you can write; the first is zero, because that is where the film starts, so moving it later hands the start to whoever is left in front. The film reorders itself around them, and it lasts as long as its last key frame — so lengthening it is a matter of moving the end.
The span between two key frames gets a pace of its own: straight through, ease in and out, ease in, ease out, or all of the movement crammed into the first or second half. It is the difference between a camera and a lift.
Take the live view here puts the main window back into that exact state. Fix what is wrong and press Use current view: the corrected state arrives as a new key frame at the end of the film. Set its time to put it where you want it, and Remove takes the old one away.
A key frame is a whole fractal with a time next to it. What sits between two of them is the stretch that joins them, and opening it shows one band per channel that moves along the way — each with its own curve, editable by hand.
Channels
Between two key frames the film interpolates the controls one at a time, each on a band of its own. The center, the view width, the angle, the parameters of the family, the color ramp, the tone, the inside and outside colors, and every finish that moves between the two — each gets a band, and each band can be given a speed curve of its own. The iteration count is the one exception, and on purpose: it is held at a single value for the whole film, the highest of the key frames, because a count that drifted during a descent would move the border between inside and outside and set the edges flickering.
A band left gray follows the pace of its stretch. Draw a curve on it and it goes its own way — the zoom can keep gliding while the color snaps.
Some things cannot fade
Between one fractal family and another there is no halfway, and the Director says so instead of inventing one. A change of family and a switch between a map and its Julia snap at the key frame, and the header counts them before you press render. A named choice or a whole count is different: those get a band with a staircase drawn on it, and you drag a step to the frame where the shape should change — a count climbing from two to six is four steps, and you place all four.
Open the stretch you are unsure about
An open stretch draws one real frame every so many seconds, so you can see what the middle actually looks like instead of imagining it. It changes nothing about the film — only how much of it you are shown at once.
Play back what exists
The preview plays the frames already on disk, once or on a loop. It is not a simulation: the finished frames where they exist and are still this film's, and the 320-pixel draft frames everywhere else — never a guess. Bend a curve after a render and the full-size frames stay on disk untouched, but the preview stops using them and shows the draft, which is redone at every edit.
Rendering
A film is a lot of frames, and none of that should stop you working. The render goes off into its own process with its own small window, and that window has a dial: low power, balanced, or full power. Balanced leaves two cores free, which is what keeps the computer usable; low power halves the workers and rests between frames, for the laptop that gets hot. You can move the dial while it is running — it applies from the next frame — and keep exploring in the meantime.
The frames already rendered stay on disk. Start again and it picks up from there — and if you only reworked one stretch, it redoes that stretch and keeps the rest. Change something that rules the whole film — the size, the frame rate, the sampling, the output — and the old frames go, because keeping them would leave a join in the middle of the video.
Two seconds after you stop touching anything, Fractaria redoes the whole film small — 320 pixels on the long side, one sample per pixel, in another process — and the preview leafs through that, with a bar counting the frames as they land — a ten-second film redoes itself in about twenty seconds, and when the bar is full the picture in the corner is the last thing you composed. When it is right, ask for the size you want: four samples per pixel is the measured minimum for a film worth keeping, and the draft is there so you never spend that twice.
Two outputs, and you choose one before you render. Video (.mp4) lays the frames down as JPEG and packs them with the encoder your system already has — which today means macOS. PNG sequence lays down numbered lossless frames in a folder you can open, for a grade, a compositor, or the encoder you already trust; that one does not go into an .mp4, and Fractaria says so instead of quietly making something else. It ships no encoder of its own, and that is a licensing decision rather than an oversight.
The films you have started. A project keeps its frames, so closing the window is not the same as throwing the render away — and a film travels on its own: export the recipe wherever you like, import it anywhere else, and the frames stay behind, because those are the result and not the recipe.
Where there is no encoder the button is simply off, and the panel says why. It never pretends a film was made when it was not — and the frames are on your disk either way, which is the part that took the hours.
One purchase, everything included — the animation editor too, not a tier above it. No subscription, no unlocks: every fractal, every palette and every export size the application can make, from the first run.
macOSWindows
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