GenArts, Inc.

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.

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:

Sapphire: Had 220 effects in nine categories: Adjust, Blur & Sharpen, Composite, Distort, Lighting, Render, Stylize, Time, and Transitions.

Sapphire Accents: A package of extra visual effects from the Monsters GT and particleIllusion products. The Monsters GT product had 50 effects that were similar to Sapphire—like fire, fluids, lightning, and blurs—but with specific, unique looks to those effects. particleIllusion was designed for particle effects and used by itself or as an After Effects plugin. Effects in particleIllusion were created through parameters in such a way that there are an infinite number of particle-based effects that were possible.

Sapphire Edge: Used the same visual effects engine as the Sapphire product, but was designed for ease-of-use and only available for Sony Vegas Pro and Final Cut Pro.