Alpha and the History of Digital Compositing

The history of digital image compositing—other than simple digital implementation of known film art—is essentially the history of the alpha channel. Distinctions are drawn between digital printing and digital compositing, between matte creation and matte usage, and between (binary) masking and (subtle) matting. The history of the integral alpha channel and premultiplied alpha ideas are presented and their importance in the development of digital compositing in its current modern form is made clear. Basic Definitions Digital compositing is often confused with several related technologies. Here we distinguish compositing from printing and matte creation—eg, blue-screen matting. Printing v Compositing Digital film printing is the transfer, under digital computer control, of an image stored in digital form to standard chemical, analog movie film. It requires a sophisticated understanding of film characteristics, light source characteristics, precision film movements, film sizes, filter characteristics, precision scanning devices, and digital computer control. We had to solve all these for the Lucasfilm laser-based digital film printer—that happened to be a digital film input scanner too. My colleague David DiFrancesco was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences last year with a technical award for his achievement on the scanning side at Lucasfilm (along with Gary Starkweather). Also honored was Gary Demos for his CRT-based digital film scanner (along with Dan Cameron). Digital printing is the generalization of this technology to other media, such as video and paper. Digital film compositing is the combining of two or more strips of film—in digital form—to create a resulting strip of film—in digital form—that is the composite of the components. For example, several spacecraft may have been filmed, one per film strip in its separate motion, and a starfield may have also been filmed. Then a digital film compositing step is performed to combine the separate spacecrafts over the starfield. The important point is that none of the technology mentioned above for digital film printing is involved in the digital compositing process. The separate spacecraft elements are digitally represented, and the starfield is digitally represented, so the composite is a strictly digital computation. Digital compositing is the generalization of this technology to other media. Alpha and the History of Digital Compositing Microsoft Tech Memo 7 Alvy 2 This only means that the digital images being combined are represented in resolutions appropriate to their intended final output medium; the compositing techniques involved are the same regardless of output medium being, after all, digital computations. No knowledge of film characteristics, light sources characteristics, film movements, etc. is required for digital compositing. In short, the technology of digital film printing is completely separate from the technology of digital film compositing. The technology of digital film scanning is required, perhaps, to get the spacecrafts and starfield into digital form, and that of digital film printing is required to write the composite of these elements out to film, but the composite itself is a computation, not a physico-chemical process. This argument holds regardless of input or output media. In fact, from hereon I will refer to film as my example, it being clear that the argument generalizes to other media. Matte Creation v Matte Usage The general distinction drawn here is between the technology of pulling mattes, or matte creation, and that of compositing, or matte usage. To perform a film composite of, say a spacecraft, over, say a starfield, one must know where on an output film frame to write the foreground spacecraft and where to write the background starfield—that is, where to expose the foreground element to the unexposed film frame and where to expose the background element. We will ignore for the moment, for the purpose of clarity, the problem of partial transparencies of the foreground object that allow the background object to show through partially. In classic film technology, predating the computer by decades ([Beyer64], [Fielding72], [Vlahos80]), the required spatial information is provided by a (traveling) matte, another piece of film that is transparent where the spacecraft, for example, exists in the frame and opaque elsewhere. This can be done with monochrome film. It is also easy to generate the complement of this matte, sometimes called the holdout matte, by simply exposing the matte film strip to an unexposed strip of monochrome film. So the holdout matte film strip is placed up against the background film strip, in frame by frame register, called a bipack configuration of film, and exposed to a strip of unexposed color film. The starfield, for example, gets exposed to this receiving strip where the holdout matte does not hold out—that is, where the holdout matte is transparent. Then the same strip of film is re-exposed to a bipack consisting of the matte and the foreground element. This time the spacecraft, for example, gets exposed exactly where the starfield was not exposed. Digital film compositing technology is, in its simplest implementation, the digital version of this process, where each strip of film is replaced with a digital equivalent, and the composite is done with a digital computation. Once the foreground and background elements are in digital form and the matte is in digital form, then digital film compositing is a computation, not a physico-chemical process. As we shall see, the computer has caused several fundamentally new Alpha and the History of Digital Compositing Microsoft Tech Memo 7 Alvy 3 ideas to be added to the compositor’s arsenal that are not simply simulations of known analog art. The question becomes: Where does the matte come from? There are several classic (pre-computer) answers to this question. One set of techniques (at least one of which, the sodium vapor technique, was invented by Petro Vlahos ) causes the generation of the matte strip of film simultaneously with the foreground element strip of film. So this technique simultaneously generates two strips of film for each foreground element. Then optical techniques are used, as described above, to form the composite. Digital technology has nothing new to contribute here; it simply emulates the analog technique. Another technique called blue-screen matting provides the matte strip of film after the fact, so to speak. Blue-screen matting (or more generally, constant color matting, since blue is not required) was also invented by Petro Vlahos [Vlahos64]. It requires that a foreground element be filmed against a constant-color, often bright ultramarine blue, background. Then with a tricky set of optical and film techniques that don’t need to concern us here, a matte is generated that is transparent where the the foreground film strip is the special blue color and opaque elsewhere, or the complement of this. There are digital simulations of this technique that are complicated but involve nothing more than a digital computer to accomplish. The art of generating a matte when one is not provided is often called, in filmmaking circles, pulling a matte. It is an art, requiring experts to accomplish1. I will generalize this concept to all ways of producing a matte, and term it matte creation. The important point is that matte creation is a technology separate from that of compositing, which is a technology that assumes a matte already exists. In short, the technology of matte creation is completely separate from the technology of digital film compositing. Petro Vlahos has been awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his inventions of this technology, a lifetime achievement award in fact. The digital computer can be used to simulate what he has done and for relatively minor improvements. At Lucasfilm, my colleague Tom Porter and I implemented digital matte creation techniques and improved them, but do not consider this part of our compositing technology. It is part of our matte creation technology. It is time now to return to the discussion of transparency mentioned earlier. One of the hardest things to accomplish in matte creation technology is the representation of partial transparency in the matte. Transparencies are important for foreground elements such as glasses of water, windows, hair, halos, filmy clothes, motion blurred objects, etc. I will not go into the details of why this is difficult or how it is solved, because that is irrelevant to the arguments here. The important points are (1) partial transparency is fundamental to convincing com1 I have proved, in fact, in [Smith82b] that blue-screen matting is an underspecified problem in general and therefore requires a human in the loop. Alpha and the History of Digital Compositing Microsoft Tech Memo 7 Alvy 4 posites, and (2) representing transparencies in a matte is part matte creation technology, not the compositing technology, which just uses the result.