The VES Handbook of Visual Effects, 2nd Edition

APPENDIX C

GLOSSARY

This glossary is intended to be a practical guide to words commonly used in the visual effects field. It includes not only well-defined technical terms but also a number of colloquialisms that are often used within the industry. The visual effects industry is still a fairly new, volatile field. As such, any attempt to define the terminology that is in use within this discipline risks rapid obsolescence. What’s more, many terms used in the visual effects world can be rather ambiguous, or at least very context dependent. This is due in no small part to the fact that visual effects is a mesh of so many different disciplines. Terms from the fields of traditional animation, computer animation, image processing, photography, computer ...