Computer animation and visual effects
A research associate professor in the top-ranked USC School of Cinema-Television (CNTV), Richard Weinberg is the founding director of the school's Computer Animation Laboratory, which he established in 1985. He holds a joint appointment at USC's Annenberg Center for Communications.
Before joining USC, Weinberg established the Computer Graphics Group at Cray Research and developed computer graphics software and systems for NASA's Johnson Space Center, Lockheed Electronics, and Digital Productions. He received his master of science degree and doctorate from the University of Minnesota, and received its Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2003.
Weinberg's research interests include computer animation, scientific visualization, visual effects and entertainment technology. As digital movie production expands to include distributed computing facilities, he and his colleagues are increasingly dependent on high-speed, worldwide networks to review and revise digital film clips, computer animation and virtual sets remotely. They also rely on increasingly powerful graphics workstations and encounter software issues similar to those that challenge researchers that use computing in the sciences.
Weinberg is a visiting professor at the Tokyo University of Technology and frequently lectures in Japan, most recently on the emerging technologies and implications of digital cinema.
He co-designed the original curriculum for USC's Master of Fine Arts program in Film, Video and Computer Animation. The USC School of CNTV's Division of Animation and Digital Arts, which Weinberg helped to develop, educates undergraduate and graduate students and conducts research in the expanding and broadly defined fields of animation and digital arts.
The USC School of CNTV is at the cutting edge of animation and new media, with facilities that include HP XW8200 high-performance graphics workstations with NVIDIA graphics systems, a Vicon 8-camera motion capture system, Sony high-definition digital video cameras, and extensive facilities for high definition green-screen digital compositing with an HD Ultimatte and a visual effects laboratory.
These facilities provide an extremely broad range of capabilities for professional-quality artistic exploration, with industrial grade software for two- and three-dimensional animation from Alias, Avid/Softimage, Adobe and others. Graduates of the Animation and Digital Arts program have gone on to careers at Sony ImageWorks, PIXAR, Digital Domain, Disney Feature Animation, DreamWorks SKG/PDI and Industrial Light and Magic.
