page_title: GenArts, Inc.
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: GenArts, Inc. / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Karl's barn and GenArts' first office space
context_page_description: GenArts, Inc. is a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based developer of visual effects software for the film, broadcast and advertising industries. A majority of traditional video content such as movies, commercials, television shows, newscasts and music videos include at least some special effects created in a GenArts product. GenArts create 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.
  GenArts is 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. This has changed since 2008, when new leadership, product development and a series of acquisitions broadened GenArts' focus, product portfolio and customer base. GenArts now creates plugins developed for smaller budget video editing tools typically used by smaller studios, the videographer market, or creators of content distributed solely online on websites like YouTube.
context_section_description: 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' 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 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 of the software was also reduced.
  After 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.
  In 2019, Karl Sims and Gary Oberbrunner each won an Emmy Award, recognizing their "outstanding achievement in engineering development" of Sapphire Plug-ins.
caption: Karl Sims' barn and the first GenArts office space
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