Company of Science and Art

~ the obituary ~

Almost every title sequence and explainer video made in the last thirty years passed through a program written by four people in Providence, Rhode Island, at a company that existed for under three years and was gone before most of the program's users were born.

CoSA was founded in 1990 by Greg Deocampo, David Foster, David Herbstman and David Simons, with William J. O'Farrell brought in as chief executive the same year. Deocampo also worked in the video art collective Emergency Broadcast Network, which says something useful about what kind of company this was: people who made things with video, wanting tools that did not exist yet. The first product, released in 1991, was PACo, which compressed a movie and played it back on both a Macintosh and a PC. This was before QuickTime was ordinary and well before anyone expected video to simply work on a computer.

The second product was the one. After Effects 1.0 shipped in January 1993 for the Macintosh, and what it did was take the layer model people already understood from image editing and give it a timeline. You stacked footage, put effects on the stack, set keyframes on the parameters, and left the machine rendering overnight. That workflow already existed in broadcast suites costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. CoSA put it on a desktop computer.

Aldus bought the company in July 1993, six months after the product shipped. Aldus was itself bought by Adobe the following year, closing on 31 August 1994, so After Effects changed corporate owner twice inside twenty months and the people who wrote it ended up at a company none of them had joined. CoSA had about three years total, and half of that was before it had anything to sell.

I have no history with this program at all. Motion graphics was not somewhere I went, and by the time I knew the name After Effects it was an Adobe product on somebody else's machine with the letters CoSA nowhere on it. What is strange from here is how close the two things sit. I spend my working life on computer vision, which is the same problem run backwards, pulling structure out of frames instead of putting it in. The two toolchains grew up in separate rooms and never had a reason to meet.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

The timing was not luck exactly, but it was close. In 1993 a Macintosh Quadra could just barely render video, and the broadcast houses that owned motion graphics were charging by the hour for machines that cost more than a house. Anything that credibly did a tenth of that work for a hundredth of the money was going to sell. After Effects did considerably more than a tenth.

It also arrived into a category that desktop publishing had already proved could exist. Aldus knew exactly what it was buying, because Aldus had done this once before with PageMaker: take a production process that lives in a specialist shop with specialist equipment, and move it onto a machine that sits on a desk. Buying CoSA was the same play run again on video, and it was the last significant thing Aldus did before Adobe absorbed it.

~ what got buried with it ~

PACo went into the ground with the company and nobody mourned it, which is a little unfair. Cross-platform video playback in 1991 was a genuinely hard problem that everyone was solving badly, and PACo solved it well enough that people shipped CD-ROM titles on it. QuickTime and Video for Windows made it redundant within a few years, the way a platform feature always makes a working product redundant. The name survives mostly in the credits of old discs.

~ the long tail ~

After Effects is still shipping and still the standard, which makes CoSA one of the shortest-lived companies in this cemetery holding one of the longest-running products. The founders scattered afterward, but David Simons stayed with the code through Aldus and then Adobe and remained attached to it for decades after the company that made it was gone. That is a rare career shape in software: one program, one lifetime.

The name the company gave itself turned out to describe the job it left behind. Science and art was the split: the compositing math on one side, and on the other a population of people who wanted to make something move and did not care how it worked. Every tool in the category since has had to serve both, and most of them have been measured against a program written in Rhode Island in 1992 and 1993.

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