preliminary composite

You're sitting in the composite suite, raw footage in front of you — green screen, overexposed, no color management yet. The first thing you do before getting lost in keyframing and rotoscoping: a preliminary composite. This is your functional snapshot — all layers roughly assembled so you and the supervisor can actually see where things are headed.

In a practical workflow, the preliminary composite is the point where you've tested keying, scaling, positioning, and basic timing without getting bogged down in a hundred minutiae. You apply the greenscreen key, place the background plate, position the VFX elements — whether a 3D object or further footage — at approximate size and position. The whole thing is not yet color-matched, and sharpness and motion blur, just like the final grade, are not yet applied. But the supervisor and director will immediately see: Does the perspective work? Is the element timed correctly? Is the scale sensible?

The preliminary composite saves you hours of pointless fine-tuning. If the supervisor objects to the basic placement at this stage, you make a quick correction — not three days of rotoscope optimization for an element that has to go elsewhere anyway. This is also the moment where you use your network references: read the camera moves, the plate's movements, the shadow placement. Anything that would come back to haunt you later if you overlooked it.

In editing, the preliminary composite differs from the final composite primarily through the deliberate omission of detail work. No color correction based on lighting theory, no edge treatment, no chromatic aberration matching — just the essential elements so that the decision-makers get a feel for timing, size, and spatial placement. Some houses also call this a rough composite or working composite, depending on team terminology. The preliminary composite is your working hypothesis before you commit to the final composite.