JOS JOS Compositor
0.9 beta · Windows

Node-based compositing, reimagined.

JOS Compositor is a VFX compositor built around a float, scene-referred pipeline, OpenColorIO, multichannel EXR and GPU processing.

JOS Compositor: a CG robot shot in the viewer, the timeline below it, and a node graph splitting a multilayer EXR into Shuffles, Grades and Merges, each node showing its render time

The viewer, timeline and node graph.

What's different

Things your current compositor can't do

JOS offers you a modern and efficient UI.

Settings inside the node

Double-click a node and its settings open right there in the graph, with every control the Properties panel has. You can work without a Properties panel at all.

Every channel is a socket

Expand a node to get a socket for R, G, B, A and for every layer of your EXR. Wire a single pass straight where it's needed, with no Shuffle. A Cryptomatte is one socket.

Wire first, pick the node after

Drag a wire into empty space and the node picker opens; the node you choose arrives already connected. Drag a wire from one input to another to move it, or to swap two inputs.

Vertical or horizontal

Build your tree top to bottom or left to right. Your choice is remembered.

Trackers that do the job

Stabilize, Match Move and CornerPinTracker track and move the picture in one node: no Export, no second node to wire. Track repair fills gaps in a track and works out a hidden corner from the other three. Stabilize and Match Move take as many track pairs as a shot needs, so when one leaves the frame another takes over, and tracks can extrapolate past their last frame. More below.

Roto and paint, redesigned

  • A remove brush that paints objects out with texture from around them: no clone source to set
  • Each roto point animates on its own, not the whole shape
  • Bezier tool with alignment guides and typed offsets
  • Dodge and burn limited to shadows, midtones or highlights
  • Permanent black and white swatches: Shift+X switches them
  • A master offset moves every stroke at once, keyed or linked to a tracker, with Keep Transform and a tweak on top

SVG and vector graphics

Drop Illustrator or Affinity SVG files into the comp, layer order kept. The Vector Graphics node draws lines and shapes with fills, outlines, dashes, gradients, masks, filters and text, all editable and animatable.

An AI that shares your undo

The built-in MCP server lets Claude, or any other MCP client, build and edit the comp you have open. Its changes go into your undo history. More below.

Any language

Node names and notes in any script, with spaces and punctuation, and a Text node that shapes every script correctly. See it below.

FocalFinder

Draw vanishing lines on a still and get a matching camera, ready for projections.

Camera tracker guides

Draw a few lines along a building's edges or a kerb and the camera solve keeps them, through the lens it solves: the scene comes out square to your shot, ready for a cube that fits. Draw the same edge when the camera comes back round a room and the drift closes.

Live link with Blender

Model, light and animate in Blender and watch the scene update in JOS as you work. Lights, cameras and moves you set in JOS show up in Blender, and undo works on both sides.

Blender's best nodes

Kuwahara, Pixelate, Despeckle, MaskToSDF, DoubleEdgeMask, plus Voronoi, Wave and Brick textures.

Keying included

Our own Screen Keyer, IBK, ChromaKeyer and Despill, alongside Keyer and HueKeyer. No third-party keyer licence needed. Nuke scripts keyed with IBK or Keylight come in keying like Nuke: measured on real green-screen shots, on motion blur and fine hair.

Sliders inside the number fields

Drag any number field to change its value, and hold Shift to move ten times slower for fine adjustments. Click to type a value instead. Blender users will feel right at home. 😉

Set up for your machine

A hardware test measures your CPU, memory, GPU and disk, then fills in the cache, GPU and tile settings for you.

And many small things

  • A file browser with picture thumbnails
  • Timeline markers, and Ctrl to scrub the sound only
  • Right-click any menu item to give it a shortcut
  • Loop, bounce and noise on animation curves, without expressions
  • Snap lines up sockets, not node corners
  • No licence? Your comps still open, read-only

Coming from Nuke

The same nodes, a different node system

Your Nuke scripts open in JOS with the same nodes and settings. What changes is how you work with them in the graph.

Settings inside the node

Nuke: double-click a node to open its settings in the Properties bin.

JOS: double-click a node and it expands in the graph to show all of its settings, with the same controls, tables and buttons. Open several at once, and close the Properties panel if you like.

Expand a node to expose its sockets

Nuke: one output per node. To use a single channel or a pass, you add a Shuffle or a Copy.

JOS: click the ▸ in a node's header and its output splits into R, G, B and A sockets, plus one for every other channel and layer of the image. Wire a single pass straight to where it's needed.

Combine replaces Shuffle

Nuke: Shuffle and Copy nodes, with a grid of checkboxes to route channels between inputs.

JOS: Combine builds an image from wires. Plug a channel, a layer or a whole image into its R, G, B, A and in sockets. Click an empty socket to fill that channel with white or black. Every layer of the main image passes through unless you turn that off. Shuffle and Copy nodes in imported scripts are kept as they are, so old scripts render exactly as before.

Trackers that move the picture themselves

Nuke: track in a Tracker, use Export to make a Transform or CornerPin2D, then wire that node into your tree.

JOS: four tracker nodes, each doing one job. Stabilize steadies its plate and Match Move moves the image on its input. CornerPinTracker pins an image onto four tracked corners. Tracker only tracks: link its points to any setting, a Roto's master offset for example. Each one starts with its tracks ready to place, and has a mask input to keep what passes in front out of the tracking. The image they move is placed with a box right in the viewer.

Long file paths, readable

Nuke: a long path runs off the end of the file field.

JOS: Ctrl+click a file field to unfold the whole path, wrapped over several lines and editable. Ctrl+click again to fold it.

Wire first, pick the node after

Nuke: create the node, then connect it.

JOS: drag a wire into empty space and the node picker opens. The node you choose arrives already connected. Or click an output, then an input, to connect nodes far apart.

Features

Built for real shots

About 160 nodes, made for production plates: EXR passes, colour pipelines, big frames and farm renders. Everything on this list works in the current beta.

Nuke in, Nuke out

Open .nk scripts and gizmos: the tree is rebuilt using JOS nodes with their corresponding settings, and gizmos become Nests. Popular free gizmos are tested against Nuke's own renders, and most give the same picture. You can also export a comp back to .nk. Not all Nuke nodes are supported.

A node graph that feels familiar

Fast gestures and keyboard shortcuts for every common move.

  • Tab node picker with fuzzy search
  • Ctrl+F finds nodes by name and frames them
  • Branches that can't render (a missing file, an unknown node) shown in red, with the reason
  • Drop a node on a wire to insert it, shake it to pull it out
  • Clones, linked nodes, Backdrops, a minimap, per-node render times
  • Dockable panels and workspaces

Colour managed with OpenColorIO

Every colour conversion goes through OCIO, with the ACES configs built in or any config file, chosen per project. Processing is float and scene-referred: values are never clamped behind your back, and viewer settings never alter your images.

Every channel, every pass

Images carry any number of named channels. Multilayer and multi-part EXRs keep every pass, and each one can be wired on its own without a Shuffle.

  • Cryptomatte, with a picker in the viewer
  • Deep compositing: DeepRead, DeepMerge, DeepHoldout, DeepRecolor and more

Roto and paint

Roto shapes (Bezier, ellipse, rectangle, and open splines: strokes with a width per point) with feather and motion blur, animated point by point. Paint with brush, eraser, clone, reveal, remove, blur, smear, and dodge and burn. Curves and strokes stay editable: the pixels are always derived from them. Auto Path Tracking makes a shape follow a subject that bends and moves, forward, backward and between your corrections.

Tracking

Point tracking for stabilizing and match-moving, CornerPin2D, a planar tracker, and a camera tracker.

Keying, warping, time

  • ScreenKeyer, IBKColour and IBKGizmo, Keyer, ChromaKeyer, HueKeyer, Despill
  • SplineWarp, GridWarp, IDistort, STMap
  • OpticalFlow, Retime, TimeWarp, motion vectors, VectorBlur
  • Defocus, ZDefocus, Glow, Grain, Denoise, Text

Fast where it counts

Only what you look at is computed: the visible region and the viewed layer, at the viewer's zoom level.

  • Tiled rendering
  • RAM, disk and GPU caches, proxy levels, prefetch for playback
  • Vulkan GPU processing for Grade, Merge, Blur, Transform and the maths nodes

3D on USD

A 3D viewport, cameras, lights, cards and primitives, MaterialX/OpenPBR materials and projections, built on USD and Hydra. Point clouds, Gaussian splats and VDB volumes come in too.

Animation and expressions

Every parameter can be keyed, from sliders to checkboxes. Includes a curve editor with a toolbar, a pivot to scale keys about any frame and Blender-style keys, a dope sheet, expressions and linked parameters.

Nests and Precomps

Group nodes into a Nest with its own inputs, outputs and exposed parameters. Double-click to go inside, or nest a selection with Ctrl+G.

Fits your pipeline

  • OpenFX plugins, with Natron's free set (about 500 effects) a click away
  • Python 3.12 with PySide6, a script editor and plugin menus
  • jos-render for render farms, with no UI
  • A path manager, with path mappings between Windows and Linux

Formats

OpenEXR, PNG, JPEG, TIFF and WebP in and out, as files or sequences. Movies in and out as MOV, MP4 or MKV: Apple ProRes (422, 422 HQ, 4444), H.264, H.265 and FFV1. iPhone footage opens as shot. .braw camera files in, with their decode settings (JOS Compositor compatible with Blackmagic Design Blackmagic RAW). Audio with waveforms on the timeline.

Any language

Your comp, in your language

The interface is in English, but everything you write can be in any language: node names, notes, and the text you render with the Text node. Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Tamil, Thai, Greek, Georgian, Russian, Japanese, Korean: names can have spaces and punctuation too.

Twelve nodes in the JOS Compositor node graph, named in Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Russian, Japanese, Greek, Georgian, Tamil and Korean

AI assistant

Comp alongside an AI

JOS Compositor has a built-in MCP server. Claude, or any other MCP client, can work in the project you have open: create and connect nodes, set parameters and expressions, render, and inspect pixels. Its edits appear in the graph straight away and go through the same undo stack as yours, so Ctrl+Z undoes them like your own.

Status

Where it stands

JOS Compositor is in beta (0.9) on Windows. Development is moving fast, and the goal is to comp a real production shot from start to finish.

In the beta

  • About 250 nodes: grading, merging, transforms, keying, warps, time, effects
  • Roto and paint
  • Tracking: point, planar and camera
  • Cryptomatte and deep compositing
  • 3D on USD: a 3D viewport, cameras, lights, MaterialX/OpenPBR materials, projections, point clouds, Gaussian splats and VDB volumes
  • Live link with Blender, both ways
  • Nuke scripts: import and export
  • Speed: tiles, disk and GPU caches, proxies, Vulkan GPU
  • Pipeline: OpenFX, Python, farm rendering, path mapping
  • AI: MCP server

In progress

  • Nuke's 3D in imported scripts: cameras, lights, cards, projections and shaders rebuilt as JOS's 3D
  • Alembic, FBX and OBJ files: cameras and geometry
  • 3D: comp images and colour nodes inside materials, a solved camera track turned into a scene in one step, rendering straight from the 3D view
  • More GPU nodes

Planned

  • Linux version
  • Floating licences and online activation
  • Community nodes shared as plain node graphs

Beta

Want to try it?

The beta is open to compositors who want to put it through real work. Ask for a beta licence: it works on any Windows computer.

We use your name and email only for your licence and the beta.

Questions or news: info@jungleofsharks.com