Need a free compositing app that supports OFX plugins? ButtleOFX is a project to watch, and it just got its first alpha release.

We already introduced you to this interesting project last year, and it's somehow reassuring that a standalone free compositing app is doing well, given the sad history of Ramen and Synapse, and the confusing state of Jahshaka.

For those who haven't heard of ButtleOFX yet, it's an application for VFX compositing that is built on top of TuttleOFX, a free commercial-grade framework for compositing with OpenFX plugins (that is, your Sapphire, Keylight etc. plugins should work).

ButtleOFX is currently being developed by 5 students from IMAC Engineering school — Anthony Guiot, Baptiste Moizard, Jonathan Douet, Lucie Delaire, Virginie Lalande — led by Fabien Castan, one of major contributors to TuttleOFX.

It's the second team of students working on this project. For the new round of development they decided to focus on improving the user experience before adding more features. Either way, nearly all major changes are user visible:

A Quick Mode to apply effects without using the graph editor.

A browser to navigate in your image files directly in the software (with thumbnails and sequences detection).

UI layout management with three workspaces.

A help widget to get documentation about plugins.

Various improvements in the graph editor.

The changes are nicely summarized in this video:

For now, only a build for 64bit Linux systems is available for downloading. A 64bit build for Windows 7 is expected later, and a build for Mac isn't planned yet. Source code is up on GitHub.

Further development cycle will be started by the next team of students later this year. Some of the planned features they will be working on are: batch processing, user presets, progress information during the computation directly within the graph editor, interactions on images from plugins. The current team notes, though, that the scope of the further work can be affected by users' feedback.

On a more official note, a month ago the TuttleOFX project joined the Open Effects Association that was founded by Assimilate, Autodesk, Digieffects, FilmLight, The Foundry, GenArts, and RE:Vision Effects in 2009.