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.)