Īfter creating plugins for the video editing software, GenArts has made the shift to supporting applications such as Avid, Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects that support a broader market of video creators. The company had 220 image processing and synthesis effects by 2008. īetween 20 GenArts released Sapphire Plug-ins for Autodesk, Avid, After Effects, Shake, Final Cut Pro, Combustion, Premiere, Digital Fusion, Quantel with Synapse and 844/x. Karl won the MacArthur "genius grant" in the '90s for his work on artificial evolution. By 1999, three years after the company was founded, GenArts had achieved significant commercial success, a pace of growth founder Karl Sims says he did not expect. GenArts' first office space was in Karl's barn. The company name was changed to GenArts in June, 1999. In 1997 Gary Oberbrunner joined GenArts as its second employee. as Genetic Arts in 1996 in Cambridge, MA as a developer of Discreet Spark Plugins. Karl Sims' barn and the first GenArts office space In 2008, product development and a series of acquisitions broadened GenArts' focus, product portfolio and customer base, and 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. GenArts was best known for its traditional role in high-end production environments, where high budget and broadly distributed video content is being created by a large corporation. GenArts created visual effects software and plugins that integrate visual effects such as glows, lightning, fire and fluids into post-production video editing software from companies like Apple, Adobe, Autodesk and The Foundry.
A majority of traditional video content such as movies, commercials, television shows, newscasts and music videos included at least some special effects created in a GenArts product. was a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based developer of visual effects software for the film, broadcast and advertising industries.