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's barn and the first GenArts office space The company has 29,000 customers including Disney, Lucasfilm, Paramount Pictures, MTV, Univision, Televisa, and Warner Brothers. It's also used in newscasts, music videos by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, and television shows like Lost and CSI. GenArts has been used in feature films like X-Men, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, several Star Wars movies, and the Matrix Trilogy. Many Bollywood productions like Little Krishna and Aladin have used software from GenArts.

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.

In 2008, product development and a series of acquisitions broadened GenArts's focus, product portfolio, and customer base. 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 by a GenArts product. was a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based developer of visual effects software for the film, broadcast, and advertising industries.

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