After the war, he moved to California armed with a reference from the head of Bell Labs to Douglas Shearer, sound director and the de facto head of R&D at MGM. He worked in movie production as a design engineer, field engineer, and systems engineer.
He was a special-effects pioneer in blue- and green-screen compositing. His work made possible some of the special effects seen in Mary Poppins (1964), Ben-Hur (1959), The Birds (1963), and some of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films.
He showed an early interest in electronics and ham radio. He received his engineering degree from the University of California (Berkeley). During WWII, he worked as a designer at Douglas Aircraft, and later as a radar engineer at Bell Laboratories.