Digital Compositing In Depth: The Only Guide to Post Production for Visual Effects in Film

There is often far more going on in any given frame of a contemporary movie or commercial than meets the eye. In Digital Compositing in Depth, the techniques of both visible and invisible effects are explored and explained.

Obvious visual effects are pervasive in today's broadcast media; less obvious effects like color correction, image stabilization, object removal, and virtual backgrounds are more common than most observers might guess.

And that's exactly the point of Digital Compositing--to educate those not involved in the business, or to broaden the knowledge base of those involved with exposure to other software tools. The book starts and ends with discussions on the business of compositing: what it is, the responsibility of the compositor compared to other team members, and an excellent chapter on how small and large studios are run and how to launch your own studio.

The meat of the book contains a comprehensive set of tutorials varying in complexity, from "Basic Compositing" through "Advanced Compositing" and "Output." They cover both video and film resolution projects. The tutorials use a variety of software, most of which can be found in demo form on one of the two accompanying CDs.

Final compositing is often the last and crucial step in the development cycle of a project, but it usually gets in the limelight least. Digital Compositing in Depth is a valuable eye-opener, and a worthwhile book for anyone involved in video or film post-production. --Mike Caputo