Senior Compositor

Kodak founded Cinesite in 1992 as a proving ground for its foray into the new realm of digital film technology. Featuring the Lightning digital film scanners and film recorders with the Cineon compositing software, they were all designed specifically to work perfectly with the new 10 bit log cineon file format. Since that time Cinesite has established itself as a world class 2D compositing center for feature film digital effects. This was the scene when Cinesite's senior management brought Steve in as a Senior Compositor in 1997.

During his seven years at Cinesite, Steve worked on a long list of feature films as a Senior Compositor (click here for Cinesite compositing credit list). Mastering not only the artistic requirements of 10 bit log compositing, he also studied the mathematics behind linear vs. log image data until that was mastered as well. As a result he was expert at facilitating the incorporation of 3D linear data into log space for compositing. Steve also made a study of greenscreen and bluescreen compositing (which forms a large part of his book) developing original despill algorithms and pulling some of the most difficult mattes.

Steve learned the art and science of compositing at Sidley Wright & Associates on the Pixar computer, a special image processing computer made by Pixar. He mastered this very difficult machine, which required the artist to write huge Unix scripts to composite a shot rather than the current convenient GUI seen on all modern software, 2D and 3D. Though difficult to operate, the Pixar was very fast and had superb image quality and high enough resolution that it could do feature film work (click here for more feature film credits done with the Pixar). In addition to feature film work, the Pixar was used to do digital effects for a long list of broadcast television commercials (click here to see broadcast television commercial credits).