sapphire-rentals

It’s been the buzz around the Internet today that GenArts announced a new program where users of Final Cut Pro and After Effects can actually rent their entire Sapphire package on a monthly basis. From the GenArts website:

Available immediately, the Sapphire rental program is priced monthly at $169 for the full suite. Customers can prepay an unlimited number of months, and the minimum rental period is one month. Users can also apply up to two months of their rental fees as a credit toward the purchase of a permanent license.

That’s a great new option for the independent editor or small post house who can’t afford (or can’t justify) the $1700 cost of the Sapphire package for After Effects or Final Cut Pro. $1700 is no small investment for a lot of us out there especially considering some of the very good and very low cost plug-ins that are available for Final Cut Pro. But the Sapphire package has been available for quite a while and it is one of the highest end packages available for FCP so this rental program opens Sapphire up to a whole new market. There’s “over 200 state-of-the-art image processing and synthesis effects” in the package and it is no small learning curve to use them to their utmost effect if you will. That’s where the free trial comes in. The Sapphire demo allows for 2 weeks of usage before it watermarks effected clips. By coupling the demo with the new rental program you could learn the Sapphire collection for free and then bill the rental cost out to clients on a per-job basis. That’s a new level of higher-end effects for a reasonable cost that hasn’t really been available in Final Cut Pro before. Great idea GenArts. Now we just have to find the time to really learn these things …