GenArts, Inc.
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GenArts's special effects software was used in the production of many movies, commercials, television shows, newscasts, and music videos. GenArts software and plugins integrated visual effects such as glows, lightning, fire, and fluids into post-production video editing software from companies like Apple, Adobe, Autodesk, and The Foundry.
Wiki English | |
Company type | Private |
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Industry | Software |
Founded | 1996 |
Founder | Karl Sims |
Headquarters | Cambridge, MA, USA |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Karl Sims (Founder) Gary Oberbrunner (Chief Scientist) |
Products | Visual Effects Plug-ins |
Website | genarts.com |
GenArts was initially known for its role in high-end post production environments. In 2008, product development and a series of acquisitions broadened GenArts's focus, product portfolio, and customer base. Subsequently, GenArts created plugins developed for smaller budget video editing tools typically used by smaller studios, the videographer market, or creators of content distributed online on websites like YouTube.
Many Bollywood productions, like Little Krishna and Aladdin, have used software from GenArts. GenArts has been used in feature films like X-Men, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, several Star Wars movies, and the Matrix Trilogy. It's also used in newscasts, music videos by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, and television shows like Lost and CSI. The company has 29,000 customers, including Disney, Lucasfilm, Paramount Pictures, MTV, Univision, Televisa, and Warner Brothers.
Karl Sims founded GenArts, Inc. as Genetic Arts in 1996 in Cambridge, MA as a developer of Discreet Spark Plugins. In 1997, Gary Oberbrunner joined GenArts as its second employee. The company name was changed to GenArts in June, 1999. GenArts's first office space was in Karl's barn. By 1999, three years after the company was founded, GenArts had achieved significant commercial success, a pace of growth that founder Karl Sims says he did not expect. Karl won the MacArthur "genius grant" in the '90s for his work on artificial evolution.
Between 2000 and 2004, GenArts released Sapphire Plug-ins for Autodesk, Avid, After Effects, Shake, Final Cut Pro, Combustion, Premiere, Digital Fusion, Quantel with Synapse, and 844/x. The company had 220 image processing and synthesis effects by 2008. Prices for the software were also reduced.
After creating plugins for video editing software, GenArts made the shift to supporting applications such as Avid, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe After Effects that support a broader market of video creators.
In 2019, Karl Sims and Gary Oberbrunner each won an Emmy Award, recognizing their "outstanding achievement in engineering development" of Sapphire Plug-ins.
In 2008, GenArts received funding from Insight Venture Partners and appointed a new CEO, Katherine Hays, to execute on a new growth strategy. That strategy involved consolidating a highly fragmented visual effects market into a standards-based, single vendor, off-the-shelf approach that Katherine believed would simplify visual effects for customers. The company also focused its own R&D on standards, often acquiring popular plugins for specific video editing software and developing them for other systems. After being a single product company (Sapphire) for over a decade, the new CEO appointment and growth strategy kicked off a series of acquisitions and new partner relationships.
GenArts supported Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, Avid Systems, Autodesk systems, Nuke, OFX platforms, and Sony Vegas Pro. GenArts’s product lines included the Sapphire, Sapphire Edge, and Sapphire Accents brands. The acquired particleIllusion and Monsters GT brands were consolidated under Sapphire Accents:
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