Professional Digital Compositing: Essential Tools and Techniques

Learn professional secrets of digital compositing with this detailed guide

After filming is done, digital compositors move in to manipulate color, retouch, and perform other behind-the-scenes tricks that are necessary to improve or finalize movies, games, and commercials. Now you can learn their secrets with this one-of-a-kind guide to digital compositing.

Professional animator and author Lee Lanier not only draws upon his own experience, he has also combed some of Hollywood's most active post-production houses in search of the best solutions. Learn valuable techniques, tricks, and more.

• Covers techniques for digital compositing including transformations, plate preparation, rotoscoping, advanced render passes, particle integration, 2.5D painting, HDRI, stereoscopy and more
• Shows you digital compositing techniques that can be applied to a variety of software tools, including After Effects and Nuke
• Includes a DVD with scenes, sample bitmaps, image sequences, and more

Start your animation career right with the solid instruction in postproduction you'll find in this practical guide.

Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Develop career-worthy skills in digital compositing

Professional animator and author Lee Lanier takes you behind the scenes to show you essential digital compositing techniques in this practical guide for professionals and aspiring artists in the visual effects, feature animation, or commercial production industries. Lanier taps his own experience at Walt Disney Studios and PDI/DreamWorks, as well as the skill sets of dozens of other professionals, to provide the latest techniques.

You'll learn important compositing theory, plus critical tools, effects, filters, and nodes in Adobe After Effects and The Foundry Nuke. As a bonus, the book includes interviews with compositing experts from such studios as ILM, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Digital Domain, and a dozen more. If you want to earn a living as a professional digital compositor, start with this detailed guide.

• Pull clean mattes from bluescreen and greenscreen

• Learn the mathematical inner workings of filter effects and nodes

• Apply color theory, color calibration, and color grading to your project

• Successfully rotoscope, motion track, and matchmove live-action footage

• Combine CG render passes such as depth, motion vector, UV, and ambient occlusion

• Set up 2.5D scenes with 3D lights, cameras, and materials

• Master advanced techniques, including optical flow and stereoscopic 3D

• Study the approaches taken by the pros through included interviews

The DVD includes After Effects project files, Nuke scripts, video footage, CG renders, texture bitmaps, and digital stills—over a gigabyte of support material in all. (DVD files were created using After Effects CS3 and Nuke 5.1v1.)

Lee Lanier is a 3D animator, digital compositor, and director. His films have played in more than 200 museums, galleries, and film festivals worldwide. Before directing the shorts Millennium Bug, Mirror, Day Off the Dead, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and 13 Ways to Die at Home, he served as a senior animator in the lighting and modeling departments at PDI/DreamWorks on Antz and Shrek. He created digital visual effects for such films as Mortal Kombat while at Buena Vista Visual Effects at Walt Disney Studios. Lee is the author of Advanced Maya Texturing and Lighting and Maya Professional Tips and Techniques, both from Sybex. He currently teaches at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood. You can view his work at BeezleBugBit.com.