Boris FX Acquires Imagineer, Building VFX Development Dynamo

Creative Cow by Tim Wilson

Boris FX, makers of VFX plug-ins and integrated workflow solutions including Boris Continuum Complete, have signed an agreement to acquire Imagineer Systems, makers of mocha Pro.

Boris Yaminitsky, the founder and CEO of Boris FX and Chairman of the combined companies
In practice, however, the relationship might better be understood as a merger, says Boris Yaminitsky, the founder and CEO of Boris FX . "The two companies will maintain their own names, product lines, and employees. Imagineer will become a subsidiary of Boris FX , but both companies will have equal weight."

They will also have an extraordinary reach when combined. Over 1 million customers are already using Boris FX plug-ins inside Avid Media Composer, Adobe After Effects, The Foundry Nuke, Assimilate Scratch, Apple Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premiere, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve and many more. And Imagineer's mocha AE has been bundled with After Effects since 2008. Add licensing arrangements including Quantel and HitFilm, and the many users of mocha Pro, and mocha is easily the world's most widely used tracking technology.

Even more than products, markets and companies, though, this relationship is about using partnership to extend technology. The team behind mocha Pro received a Science and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences in 2013, and approached Boris FX last year about a partnership that eventually evolved to a merger.

"Imagineer's Planar Tracker is far more advanced than any other tracker in the industry," says Boris. "Other products have area trackers, but they are all inferior because they boil down to tracking a large number of bright points. In contrast, the mocha tracker employs a computer vision approach to track the whole area as a single object." Boris also notes mocha Pro's strengths in areas including rotoscoping and object removal. read more...