i attended two siggraph conferences as a journalist, one → 1999 in LA, and → a year later in new orleans. in LA i heard talks about simulating the structure of tree branches and their growth and lots of other topics. however, what was totally new to me in 1999, was “compositing“. i thought this can’t be a spelling error and went into the big hall where artists working on big hollywood films showed their, yes, compositing works.

apart from being a journalist i studied 3D computer animation with → power animator and later → maya at that time. compositing relied on much more powerful computers, film scanners etc.

fast forward 24 years: compositing tools run on mac and windows laptops now. particularly one program caught my attention: → davinci resolve by the australian software company → blackmagic design. the free version is a powerful video editing and colour correction suite. in the paid version you get access to more sophisticated tools such as for masking and tracking. the 4 minute tutorial you find in the link above is my humble attempt to demonstrate the use of the “magic mask”.

wikipedia has articles about compositing in different languages, however, with no video, only stills. now this changed. i created a “composite“ within a minute and uploaded it to wikimedia commons.