Abstract: Lighting effects for a digital video effects system are provided through a write-side process. An array of pixel values from a source video image is mapped onto an object surface to produce an output image by storing the input image pixels in a memory and then selectively addressing the memory in accordance with a function defining the object surface to form output pixels representative of the source video image mapped onto the object surface. Before storage in the memory, a write side lighting processor modifies the intensity of the source pixels. The source images are logically divided into tiles, a tile mapper calculates a mapping of the corners of the tiles onto the object surface and a lighting factor generator uses the mapped corner points to compute normals for individual pixels using interpolation. The dot product of the interpolated normals are computed and mathematically combined with other factors to generate lighting intensity modification factors for each of the pixels of the source image.