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Serious Magic, Inc. was founded in early 2001 by a team of industry veterans to create the next generation of video software and communication tools for business, consumer, educational and professional markets. Its vision is to use its proprietary software engines to remove the complexity and high costs from video technology, enabling it to serve new, fast-growing markets. With five ground-breaking product lines and over forty industry awards, including seven "Best of Year" awards, Serious Magic and its exceptional engineering team is focused on providing complete and innovative software solutions for each of its customer segments.

The company's flagship product, Visual Communicator, introduced in 2001, is the first software to enable businesses and educators to create videos that have the look, feel and effectiveness of a network television newscast.

Serious Magic's ULTRA, introduced in 2003, is the first software that makes high-quality keying and sophisticated virtual sets dramatically easier and more practical for both studio and in-the-field video productions. The company introduced several technological advances in ULTRA, including Vector Keying™, a new approach that allows high-quality keying without a specialized studio; and VirtualTrak™, a virtual set technology which replaces expensive camera tracking with virtual camera moves.

In 2004, Serious Magic introduced DV Rack, the first PC-assist, video production software designed to work with videographers during shooting to improve video quality and prevent shooting problems. In much the same way as PCs were introduced into the editing process a decade ago, DV Rack enables videographers to integrate the computer into the video shooting process while in the field.

In 2005, Serious Magic released two new products: Vlog It! and Ovation. Vlog It!, the world's first video blogging software, targets the millions of bloggers in the world today, Vlog It! helps those with no video-editing experience or technical skills create a video blog within minutes to share information, commentary, opinion and more.

Ovation is companion software for Microsoft® PowerPoint® that automatically and instantly transforms PowerPoint slides into highly-polished, professional presentations. Based on a powerful new visualization engine, Ovation offers two key benefits; it dramatically improves presentations and then it helps presenters deliver them better.

The name Serious Magic was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's observation:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
— Arthur C. Clarke