Once the image was in the digital environment, one of the problems was, we had no means to reproduce the color spectrum, grey scale, and contrast that film produces, without converting the digital file to film, evaluating it, then going back and changing the digital image.

It's very much like filmmaking always is-you're always asked to do something that you're not sure you know how to do. So you make an educated guess as to what you think will work and you hope between that and plan B, that you can end up with a product that's really good.

I was involved in the color correction and the digital color correction. In an odd way, you end up making a film many times-the DVD, the archival record of a high-definition master, and so on.

Digital imaging has untied our hands with regards to technical limitations. We no longer have to be arbiters of technology; we get to participate in the interpretation of technology into creative content.

You had to make a camera look like it's traveling at 300 mph, but you couldn't make it actually travel at 300 mph so you had to slow everything down and build devices to do that. So you were constantly engineering.

Because I come from that old-school optics environment, I know stuff about depth of field and camera movement and things that are not necessarily a part of the curriculum for people who started on a box and have never done anything that wasn't on a box.

Boy, am I glad there wasn't a fourth episode of Lord of the Rings.