compositing and boxx

Digital compositing is the crucial stage of modern post-production where all visual elements both real and virtual come together in a single, coherent vision. All manner of digitized properties can be merged into one scene: digitized film, matte paintings for backgrounds, rendered frames of animated objects or characters, animated text, digital images, and 3-D environments.

Powerful compositing software packages offer VFX professionals extraordinary control over how all elements are combined. A multitude of tools allow to seamlessly integrate them from the point of view of scale, lighting, motion, and color.

BOXX puts a special emphasis on designing workstations with the power and features required by this essential aspect of producing modern moving images. The APEXX line of super-workstations have the exceptional local storage capability necessary to put vast amounts of digitized images at the artist's fingertip.. They also have the multi-processor power required to easily apply complex effects on a great number of frames with the speed needed to maximize the productivity of the compositor.

Arthur Widmer, who pioneered image compositing, died at the age of 92 in the of summer 2006. His extraordinary contribution to this essential VFX tool was recognized by the Academy with a lifetime achievement award last year. He must have been thrilled to live to see how far his original Ultra Violet Traveling Matte process had gone, making the blending of real and unreal elements possible on a scale that was difficult to imagine in the 1950s.