Silicon Grail Has Been Sold to Apple – Confirmed

According to the Silicon Grail website, Apple has acquired technologies from Silicon Grail, including the RAYZ and Chalice product lines…..

It’s official, according to the Silicon Grail web site. Apple has acquired another very strong visual effects tool to add to their fold.

Ray Feeney, the former owner of Silicon Grail was awarded the John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation earlier this year at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Sci-Tech Oscars. He has been actively involved in the visual effects field since the mid-70’s.

In 1995, Feeney founded Silicon Grail, a company that developed the groundbreaking digital compositing software Chalice — then the industry’s first commercially available compositing software designed for the demands of high-end 2D film compositing. Later, RAYZ was introduced – the next generation of compositing software designed by Silicon Grail. RAYZ was a ground-up rewrite of the the Chalice software tools and other Silicon Grail image processing code. More recently, Kodak agreed to provide Silicon Grail with the Kodak Cineon source code, providing these tools within the RAYZ application.

The fact that Apple now has rights to these tools could be critical in the future of the effects market. Coupled with the recent purchase of NothingReal (and its Shake and Tremor software apps), Apple seems poised to strongly target the high-end visual effects market. The big question is not whether they will maintain Windows support (Apple has already announced dropping it for Shake), but maintain Linux support. A great number of high-end effects facilities have a major investment in linux rendering hardware. As they say, time will tell.


This was posted on the SiliconGrail website (http://www.silicongrail.com/):

For press inquiries, please call Alicia Awbrey at Apple at 408-974-0922.

For customer inquiries, please call Louis Cetorelli at Apple at 310-664-6152.

For customer support on existing licenses, please contact RFX at 323-962-7400.”