GenArts Inc., the premier provider of specialized visual effects software for the film, television and video industries, announced today GenArts Sapphire™ 5. The latest software upgrade is fully GPU-enabled to provide artists a completely interactive user experience at HD resolutions, while accelerating render speeds up to 700 percent. In addition, support for full floating point workflows will deliver true photorealistic image quality with the highest possible dynamic range. Sapphire 5 is scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 2010 for Autodesk users.

Sapphire 5 promises to markedly change the visual effects pipeline by stripping away the barriers to artists’ creativity, while significantly reducing infrastructure costs. Featuring a completely interactive user experience at HD resolutions, Sapphire 5 will enable artists — even in client-attended sessions — to push the bounds of their imagination without intrusive pauses for screen refresh. In addition, full floating point support offers photorealistic image quality with the highest possible dynamic range, so artists can faithfully recreate looks that exist only in nature – or even beyond nature – with no loss in color information.

Sapphire 5 render times have been slashed dramatically so that batch jobs once requiring overnight processing are now merely “over lunch.” Such performance gains can considerably extend the life of the nodes in a render farm or even reduce the number of nodes required to process a project.

“GenArts Sapphire has long established itself as the must-have element in the compositor’s or editor’s toolbox,” said Steve Bannerman, CMO of GenArts. “More and more customers are telling us that the opportunity cost of porting and optimizing in-house effects to new technologies like GPU is just too high. Sapphire 5 represents another huge step in supporting the rapidly growing trend away from this expensive development toward standardization on tools from their trusted vendor.”

Please visit www.genarts.com/5 for more information.

Since the company’s founding in 1996, GenArts software has been utilized in hundreds of films, television broadcasts and commercials, including more than 20 Oscar-nominated pieces such as Titanic; I, Robot; Armageddon; Star Wars Episode I, II and III; The Matrix trilogy; The Lord of the Rings trilogy; Pearl Harbor; Spider Man; Pirates of the Caribbean; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; Transformers; The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; and many more.

About GenArts
GenArts, Inc. is the premier provider of specialized digital visual effects for the film, broadcast and video industries. The GenArts Sapphire, Monsters and Raptors portfolio equips digital artists with a collection of state-of-the-art image processing and synthesis effects such as glows, light rays, lens flares, lightning, film damage, fire and fluid effects. The effects seamlessly integrate as software plug-ins into leading editing and compositing systems from Adobe, Apple, Avid, Autodesk, Assimilate, Eyeon, FilmLight, The Foundry, Quantel and SGO. The company was founded in 1996 in Cambridge, Mass. www.genarts.com.