Datasheet

Compositing, editing, and adding sound are advanced postproduction activities, and a
detailed discussion of them is beyond the scope of this book. However, a multitude of
books are available on these topics for further study.
Compositing
CG is often rendered in different layers. These segments ultimately need to be put back
together. For example, in a scene where multiple characters interact, each character can
be rendered separately from the others and from the setting. Compositing is the process of
bringing together rendered elements to form the final scene, usually using compositing
software such as Autodesk’s Combustion, Adobe’s After Effects, or Apple’s Shake.
Compositing can greatly affect the look of a CG project and professionals consider it to
be an integral part of CG creation. Compositing programs allow you to compose CG ele-
ments together, but they also give you additional control over color, timing, and a host of
other additions and alterations you can make to a scene.
Editing
During editing, rendered and composited CG footage is collected and edited to fit the
script and storyboards. This process is usually more straightforward for a CG film than
for a live-action movie, provided that you made good storyboards during preproduction
to follow when assembling the finished film.
With live-action shoots, you shoot much more footage than will ultimately end up in
the film. You do this to make sure you have enough material for all your scenes and to
leave extra room for creative editing. Additionally, you have to run through all the footage
and choose which takes will be in the final product.
Because CG footage is generally much more time-consuming to generate than live
action, scenes and shots should be tightly arranged in preproduction storyboards. The
entire production can be edited beforehand in storyboards, so the scenes that are built and
animated can match the story almost down to the frame. If your preproduction was done
well, it can be just a matter of putting the shots together using an editing program such as
Adobe’s Premiere or even Apple’s Final Cut Pro. (If you don’t have an editing program,
you can use the Video Post module in 3Ds Max.). This functionality is not covered in this
introductory text, however.
A lot of students assume that they need to render a scene in a single pass and create its
intended look on the first try. This is not the case. CG has an inherently modular nature. You
can render items separately and composite them in the finishing stage while retaining the
ability to make changes in the project without rendering everything again. Rendering a proj-
ect in different layers (sometimes called passes) also gives you much greater control over the
project’s look.
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