GenArts Unveils Monsters GT for Adobe After Effects and More

The ever-expanding GenArts announced its latest product line on the eve of NAB in Las Vegas next week and compatible with Adobe's new CS5, which launches on Monday: Monsters GT for Adobe After Effects, Sapphire 5 for Adobe After Effects and Sapphire for Autodesk Smoke on Mac (also based on version 5).

"Monsters GT is the first new product that GenArts has announced since the original Sapphire 13 years ago," CMO Steve Bannerman told AWN/VFXWorld. "And it's also the first example of the fruits of our acquisition labor, if you will. When we acquired the Speed Six product line, we knew there were a couple of significant opportunities for us with these products and one of them was taking them to new host platforms and GenArts the user interface so that the controls and the settings and the presets and everything else were more intuitive for the way people are used to working in Sapphire."

"And that's what we've done with Monsters. We took the 200 or so plug-in suite of original Monsters and pulled out the ones that were unique to Monsters and we added some things to it that originally came out of Raptors -- Fluidz and Trailz -- and then we completely rewrote and refreshed the user interface so that the controls are much more Sapphire like, and then we added GPU and floating point capability and made them 64-bit to run in [Adobe Create Suite 5]. This is the first time we've delivered Monsters of any flavor on After Effects but also the first example of the completely reborn Monsters GT."

Monsters GT contains such stylized effects as CCTV, NightVision and Brush; warps and distort effects such as HeatHaze, Puddle and Ripple; and particle effects such as Rain, Smoke and Snow.

Monsters GT for After Effects will be available in May. Pricing will be $999 for either node-locked or floating licenses. GenArts Sapphire/Monsters bundle will be available for $2,299 (node-locked only).

GenArts also announced Sapphire 5 for After Effects, available in June and completely re-written to support GPU acceleration and floating point and also 64-bit.

Floating licenses will be priced at $2,499; node-locked licenses will be available for $1,699. Users may upgrade from Sapphire 2 to Sapphire 5 for $599, and monthly rental fees are priced at $169.

"The cool thing about Sapphire," Bannerman continues, "is that it works seamlessly in their environment, it works in After Effects, it works in Nuke, it works in all of the different places that they want to have compositing done in their pipeline.

GenArts will additionally port its Sapphire plug-ins to Smoke on Mac. Offering GPU acceleration, floating point and such new effects as TVDamage and Technicolor, Sapphire for Smoke on Mac will be available at the end of Q2. The $3,999 price is consistent with Autodesk's for the host system.

Finally, The Foundry announced the release of Nuke 6.0v4 along with the launch of its Nuke plug-in installer, which allows users to easily download trial versions of Nuke plug-ins as well as those of select third parties.

As part of the strategic alliance between GenArts and The Foundry, GenArts is the first to offer its Sapphire plug-ins alongside The Foundry's Nuke 6.9v4.

"The significance of this is whenever a Nuke user either a new trial version of Nuke or when they purchase Nuke and launch and run the installer, one of the things that they are going to be presented with is this third-party plug-in screen, which is going to ask if they want to install plug-ins with Nuke now. And so if they choose to install Sapphire, what they get is a fully-functional trial that's six-weeks long, which is three-weeks longer than the standard trial. And it gives Nuke users a good opportunity to put Sapphire through its paces in a real project rather than trying to do something off-line in their spare time."

Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.