Adobe has officially announced that it has now acquired Mettle’s SkyBox Suite. The latter is basically a collection of plug-ins which help virtual reality (VR) and 360-degree content creators in editing their content like VR transitions, titles, and effects. Both parties have not commented anything on the financial aspect of the deal but Mettle confirmed that it will continue to work as an independent company under the leadership of the co-founder Nancy Eperjesy. As for the co-founder Chris Bobotis, he will be joining Adobe as the director of professional video.
The SkyBox Suite is comprised of SkyBox Studio V2, SkyBox 360/VR Post FX 1 + 2, SkyBox 360/VR Tools, SkyBox 360/VR Transitions 1 + 2, and SkyBox VR Player. It has been used by a number of prominent VR and 360-degree content creators worldwide but with this acquisition, Adobe will be working on integrating these tools with Premiere Pro and After Effects. While the suite has always been meant specifically for above mentioned Adobe offerings, the integration is said to offer a better and smoother experience in VR editing which is expected to happen by the end of 2017.
Talking from the user’s point of view, none of the SkyBox Suite tools will be available for purchase during the whole integration process with Adobe, but if you happen to be an existing or legacy customer of SkyBox, the good news is that you will have the same contact and support process which was there before the acquisition. Mettle further mentioned that each customer has an extra 10 activations per license key along with an additional SkyBox Suite which will be added to the account within a couple of weeks. In case, you made any purchase up to 15 days before the acquisition announcement, you will be reimbursed by Mettle. As for Adobe Creative Cloud paid users, they simply need to send an email with some required account information to get access to SkyBox Suite plug-ins. If you are one of those users, click the source link below to get all the details. But as the whole point of the acquisition is to offer deep integration between Adobe and SkyBox offerings, users should not expect a drastic change in the way they have been using the plug-ins.