Pegs'n Co

» see pegsnco.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Pegs was the ink and paint of French animation for roughly ten years, and it was invisible from outside the industry the whole time. That is how a tool that colored a decade of cartoons ends up with a short Wikipedia article and no obituary anywhere else. It is the program that took a drawn frame, scanned it, filled it with color and composited it into a shot. If you watched a French cartoon series made between the mid-nineties and the mid-2000s, there is a good chance the colors in it were put there by this software, in a building in Paris, by people whose names were never on anything.

It started inside a studio rather than a software house. In 1991 Pixibox, an animation company then based in Arcueil just south of Paris, needed digital tools to make Pierre et Isa, one of the first fully digital animated series, and built its own rather than buy any. The first version was called Pixiscan. By 1994 the studio had decided other studios would pay for it, and the first Pegs licenses went out the door.

The ownership gets complicated after that. Humanoids Group, the comics publisher, bought Pixibox in 1997, and a separate company called Mediapegs was registered that July to handle the development and licensing of the software. A Windows NT version arrived in 1999 that could animate bitmaps and vectors in the same scene. Then the animation market had two bad years, and in September 2003 Mediapegs went bankrupt. Pixibox itself had already been wound up that March.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the second company ~

The next part is why there is a company here to bury and not just a product. Four people who had worked at Mediapegs were worried about what would become of Pegs, and of the studios whose entire production pipeline ran on it. Enough of the industry told them to go ahead that they did. The French commercial register has them incorporating the company on 7 January 2004 in the 10th arrondissement, spelled PEGS' N CO on the filing and registered under software publishing.

A new version of Pegs shipped that June. They took it to Annecy every year after that, to the market that runs alongside the animation festival, with something new each time. The software ended up in over a hundred studios and not only French ones, with Saerom in Korea and CineGroupe in Canada among the users abroad. At home it was Millimages and Alphanim. For three years a company of four people was holding up a meaningful share of European 2D animation.

~ what toon boom bought ~

On 5 June 2006, Toon Boom Animation of Montreal announced it had acquired the technology and was opening an office in France. Two days later it held a press conference about it at Annecy, booth 2.03. The release quotes Joan Vogelesang, Toon Boom's chief executive, on how integrating Pegs into the company's portfolio would let it keep delivering quality and reliability to the animation community.

No integrated version was ever released. Pegs stopped being updated and stopped being sold, and the French register records the company closing on 20 February 2007, eight months after the announcement. That is one of the ordinary ways a piece of professional software dies: not withdrawn, not replaced, just bought by a competitor with its own tools and quietly not continued. Studios that had built their pipelines on it had to move. pegsnco.fr has no DNS record today.

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