ABSTRACT
Special effects used to be, and still is, in many ways a highly specialized area of media production. Producing most realistic effects was usually quite laborious and expensive in the past. Today, the widespread use of complex and convincing special effects in low-budget productions has been encouraged and simplified by the availability of relatively inexpensive digital image-processing programs that are built into many video cameras, as well as much digital nonlinear editing and special effects computer software. This chapter provides a broad survey of both traditional and contemporary special effects that are widely used in film, video, and multimedia production.
