What happened to Profound Effects ?

[Steve Roberts]

Yep, it seems closed. However, Jeff Almasol is currently at Adobe … but still writing scripts.

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Bob Bonniol] “Anybody know what happened?”

Here are some of my guesses, Bob…

The biggest issue was lack of broad appeal and too small a market to be able to support operation. Long ago we shut off the Profound Effects forum due to lack of traffic there and when we did, I do not think that a single person (aside from members of the company themselves) ever wrote asking what had happened.

Companies like Profound Effects and Algolith made great tools but they had too small a market or too high a price, respectively. PE never really found its footing while Algolith’s business model was such that they were designed to operate as companies did back in the mid- to late 90s. When companies like Trapcode came along, the plug-ins market changed radically and even companies like DigiEffects struggled. PE tried a new marketing model that was innovative but was too far ahead of where the market was at, at the time. Profound Effects never found their market, while Algolith priced themselves out of what would likely have been one for them.

Compounding issues like these were the acquisitions made by Adobe itself and integrated into After Effects as part of the package. With AE shipping with near-endless numbers of plug-ins, just how many plug-ins do many people need anyway?

One of the saddest plug-in deaths I remember was the death of AutoMasker. Even with AE’s multiple masks and other features added since v5, AutoMasker still had features that went beyond anything there to this day.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom

Remember: Burt Bacharach lied. What the world really needs now is an undo button.