Digital Effects (studio)

It was founded by Judson Rosebush, Jeff Kleiser, Don Leich, David Cox, Bob Hoffman, Jan Prins, and others.

The company's original animation system consisted of a Tektronix display with a 1200 baud modem connection to a remote Amdahl V6 in Bethesda, Maryland, with rendering done on an IBM System 370, recording on an Information International Inc. (III) film recorder in Los Angeles, and final processing and optical printing completed back in New York.

Among their early works were historic animated sequences of Times Square, commercials for Scientific American, and a set of MTV-style demonstration reels.

The name of the company has entered the popular language as a noun which refers to visual effects which are both synthetic as well as image-altering and which occur in the realm of both 2D and 3D graphics and animation.

Besides pure 3D computer modeling and animation, digital effects include scene-to-scene transition devices, deformations such as morphing, and color manipulation.

A three-dimensional computer graphics image by Digital Effects Inc., New York, circa 1982. This image is one of the company's first to combine three dimensional objects (the bottle) along with texture mapping (the surface of the bottle and the "wallpaper" on the walls) and image mapping (the label on the bottle and the images inside the windows. The image was created using Digital Effects' Vision software, written in APL and Fortran.