Industrial Light & Magic's proprietary Saber

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Industrial Light and Magic's proprietary Sabre compositing technology is actually based on Discreet Logic's Inferno and Flame. Several key innovations separate it from the 'off the shelf' versions. Most important is the tools that accurately deal with logarithmic color conversions into and out of the system. Several nodes were also written to accurately process images in logarithmic color space. Company lore states that the name Sabre was quickly created because Discreet Logic didn't want to offer a discount to ILM in exchange for use of their name in marketing materials.

Of much greater significance to the history of digital compositing would be ILM's proprietary CompTime application. It was written entirely from scratch by ILM programmers. It relies heavily on python programming and is very customizable by artists with only a cursory knowledge of scripting and programming. Still in use today, it has handled the majority of visual effects shots created by ILM.

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