David DiFrancesco

David DiFrancesco, (born Nutley, New Jersey, 1949), is a photoscientist, inventor, cinematographer, and photographer. He is a founding member of three organizations which pioneered computer graphics for digital special effects and film with Edwin Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, including; New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab, Lucasfilm Computer Division, and Pixar, financed by Steve Jobs.

As director of the Pixar Photoscience Team at Pixar, DiFrancesco and his team were responsible for the task of accurately transferring high resolution digital images to film. In this role, he developed the world's first laser scanning and recording devices for 35mm motion picture film and established reliable, commercially successful methods for this process, called PixarVision. This pioneering work earned him two Scientific and Engineering Technical Academy Awards and 16 patents. In 1996 the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers adopted his recommended practices for governing output of digital images to film.

Before that DiFrancesco worked at Computer Image Corp., working on Scanimate with Lee Harrison, and also at Xerox PARC with Dick Shoup working on the first 8-bit shift register framebuffer technology, and at JPL with Jim Blinn working on Carl Sagan's Cosmos Series. His prototype film recorder resides in the permanent apparatus collection of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. His recent research included the development of a prototype interchangeable light field lens for motion picture cameras that enables post-production re-focusing of motion picture images and the capturing of 3D motion pictures with a single lens and camera.

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