Cinegy Ingest System Requirements
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Operating Systems Support
Cinegy Ingest runs on the following operating systems: Windows XP 32bit / 64bit SP3, Windows 7 32bit / 64bit SP1, Windows 2008 Server 64bit SP2.
Operating system recommendation: Windows 7 Professional 64bit SP1 / Windows 2008 Server 64bit SP2
Supported Video Hardware
• SDI video ingest: DVS SD Station I & II, DVS Centaurus SD & HD, BlackMagic Design Decklink, AJA
• SDI print to tape: DVS SDStation I & II , DVS Centaurus SD & HD, DVS Centaurus II SD & HD,BlackMagic Decklink
• DV print to tape: Windows compatible IEEE1394 adapter
• Virtual VT: DVS SDStation I & II , DVS Centaurus SD & HD, DVS Centaurus II SD & HD
• DV, HDV, DVCpro, FireWire(IEEE1394) ingest: Windows compatible IEEE1394 adapter
• DVB-S ingest: Technisat SkyStar2 PCI card
• DVD ingest: Any standard DVD drive
• P2 ingest: Panasonic P2 (via camera or reader) or files
• XDCAM ingest: Sony XDCAM disk (via hardware) or files
• RBF ingest: DVS Centaurus I & II (LT), DVS SDStation I & II also usable (with some limitations)
SDI Video Card Support
Cinegy Ingest supports the following SD/HD SDI video cards: AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Decklink cards, DVS Centaurus II and Centaurus II LT.
Recommended hardware: AJA Kona LHi or DVS Centaurus II LT.
Hardware Requirements for SD Operations
Quad core processor with 2.4 GHz or better (Core2Quad, Core i7). 4GB of RAM or better (6GB when using 64bit OS). Gigabit Ethernet.
Recommended hardware: Any Windows 7 certified PC or workstation. Any Windows 2008 (SP2) certified server with sufficient space to install the selected SDI card – e.g. a HP Proliant DL 380 G6 or G7.
SD Ingest Performance
The following table gives an indication of what processing power is required in relation to the number of concurrent resolutions and formats from one DV, HDV or SDI source:
| Parallel ingested formats | Core 2 Duo E840 | Xeon X3430 | Dual Xeon E5620 | Dual Opteron 6134 |
| DV only | YES |
YES | YES | YES |
| DV, Low-SD | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| DV, Low-SD, WM9 | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| High-SD, Medium-SD, Low-SD | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| High-SD, Medium-SD, Low-SD, WM9 | NO |
YES | YES | YES |
The results may vary with machines from different vendors. Factors like RAM latency are important.
Hardware Requirements for HD Operations
Dual quad core or dual six-core processors with 2.4 GHz or better (Xeon 56xx). 6GB of RAM or better. Gigabit Ethernet.
Recommended hardware: Any Windows 7 certified PC or workstation (e.g. HP Z800). Any Windows 2008 (SP2) certified server with sufficient space to install the selected SDI card – e.g. a HP Proliant DL 380 G6 or G7.
HD Ingest Performance
The following table gives an indication of what processing power is required in relation to the number of concurrent resolutions and formats from one DV, HDV or SDI source:
| Parallel ingested formats | Xeon X3430 | Dual Xeon E5620 | Dual Xeon X5660 | Dual Opteron 6134 |
| HDV only | YES |
YES | YES | YES |
| Medium-1080i only | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| High-1080i only | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| High-1080i, Low-1080i | YES |
YES | YES | YES |
| High-1080i, Medium-1080i, Low-1080i | NO |
YES | YES | YES |
| High-1080i, Medium-1080i, WM9-One | NO | YES | YES | YES |
The results may vary with machines from different vendors. Factors like RAM latency are important.
Control of Input and output devices
Input and Output devices (VTR) can be controlled via RS-422 and IEEE 1394 supporting the following commands: start, stop, record, pause, fast forward, rewind, shuttle, goto, and preroll.
Export via Virtual VT
The export via Virtual VT feature is also available, allowing Cinegy Desktop to work in slave mode and make the computer visible as a VTR for any external NLE, playout system or VTR recorder. External equipment may control Cinegy Virtual VT by RS-422 like normal BetaCam deck. This feature is available only with DVS boards.
Cinegy Air System Requirements
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Operating Systems Support
Cinegy Air (optionally with Cinegy Type) runs on the following operating systems: Windows XP 32bit / 64bit SP3, Windows 7 32bit / 64bit SP1, Windows 2008 Server 64bit SP2 .
Operating system recommendation: For server machines Windows 2008 SP2 Standard 64bit. For workstation or PC class machines: Windows 7 Professional 64bit SP1.
Supported Video Hardware
- SDI Cinegy Air playout: DVS SDStation I & II , DVS Centaurus SD & HD, BlackMagic Design Decklink SD & HD products, AJA
| SDI Playout | Standard Definition | High Definition |
| Full duplex mode (live pass through with logo insertion using only one board) | DVS SDStation I & II DVS Centaurus I & II (LT) AJA Kona LHe |
DVS Centaurus I & II (LT) AJA Kona LHi |
| Half duplex mode (live pass through with logo insertion using two different boards: one as an input and the second as an output) | BlackMagic Design Decklink, AJA Io Express | |
Hardware Requirements for SD Playout
Quad core processor with 2GHz or better (Core2Quad, Xeon 34xx, single Xeon 55xx, single Xeon 56xx). 4GB of RAM. Dual Gigabit Ethernet adapter.
Recommended hardware: HP Proliant DL380G6 or G7 with single Xeon 56xx processor 6GB RAM, mirrored system disk (e.g. SATA), local playout cache storage 4x SAS HD as striped mirror set (RAID 0/1) or 2x mirrored SSDs.
Additionally for Cinegy Type option: PCIe x16 riser card option for DL380 G6/G7 and Nvidia Quadro 600 (other cards may work but are not certified).
SD Playout Performance
The following table gives an indication of what processing power is required to guarantee smooth playout of the respective video stream and/or sequences with titles with effects. Test machines were equipped with at least 2GB RAM and used Windows XP Pro SP3
| Playout Format |
Core 2 Duo E840 | Xeon X3430 | Dual Xeon E5620 | Dual Opteron 6134 |
| DV only | YES |
YES | YES | YES |
| DV with CG and FX | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Medium-SD | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Medium-SD with CG and FX | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| High-SD |
YES | YES | YES | YES |
| High-SD with CG and FX | NO |
YES | YES | YES |
Hardware Requirements for HD Playout
Dual quad core or six-core processor with 2GHz or better (Xeon 56xx). 6GB of RAM. Dual Gigabit Ethernet.
Recommended hardware: HP Proliant DL380G6 or G7 with dual Xeon 56xx processor 6GB RAM, mirrored system disk (e.g. SATA), local playout cache storage 4x SAS HD as striped mirror set (RAID 0/1) or 2x mirrored SSDs.
Additionally for Cinegy Type option: PCIe x16 riser card option for DL380 G6/G7 and Nvidia Quadro 600 (other cards may work but are not certified).
HD Playout Performance
The following table gives an indication of what processing power is required to guarantee smooth playout of the respective video stream and/or sequences with titles with effects. Test machines were equipped with at least 4GB RAM and used Windows XP Pro SP3
| Playout Format |
Xeon X3430 | Dual Xeon E5620 | Dual Xeon X5660 | Dual Opteron 6134 |
| HDV only | YES |
YES | YES | YES |
| HDV with CG and FX | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Medium-1080i | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Medium-1080i with CG and FX | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| High-1080i | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| High-1080i with CG and FX | NO |
YES | YES | YES |
Simulcast HD/SD Playout Performance
The following table gives an indication of what processing power is required to guarantee smooth playout of the respective video stream and/or sequences with titles with effects. Test machines were equipped with at least 4GB RAM and used Windows XP Pro SP3
| Playout Format |
Xeon X3430 | Dual Xeon E5620 | Dual Xeon X5660 | Dual Opteron 6134 |
| HDV only | YES |
YES | YES | YES |
| HDV with CG and FX | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Medium-1080i | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| Medium-1080i with CG and FX | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| High-1080i | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| High-1080i with CG and FX | NO |
YES | YES | YES |
Cinegy Desktop System Requirements
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Operating Systems Support
Cinegy Desktop runs on the following operating systems: Windows XP SP3 32bit / 64bit, Windows 7 32bit / 64bit SP1, Windows Server 2008 64bit SP2 and Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 or higher (supported but not recommended).
Operating system recommendation: Windows 7 Professional 64bit SP1
Supported Hardware
The required hardware largely depends on the working video resolution to be used at each desktop machine. The hardware requirements for working with low-quality-SD files are met by virtually any machine (e.g. Intel Pentium E2160 1.8GHz or better). For all other formats the performance requirements are the same as those given for Cinegy Air (see Cinegy Air playout matrix above). For example when doing cuts-only medium-quality-SD editing (DVD-quality MPEG2) a single processor 2.7 GHz Intel Pentium E5400 machine is sufficient. However for more demanding tasks such as creating effects and titles in real-time, then a dual processor machine is required or single processor machine with dual cores
Hardware Requirements for SD Operations
Dual core processor with 2GHz or better (Core2Duo, Core i5). 2GB of RAM or better (4GB when using 64bit OS). Gigabit Ethernet recommended.
Recommended hardware: Any Windows 7 certified PC. Nvidia GT240 or GT430 graphics card or better.
Hardware Requirements for HD Operations
Single six-core processor with 2GHz or better (Core i7 or single Xeon 56xx) or dual quad or six-core processors. 6GB of RAM. Gigabit Ethernet.
Recommended hardware: HP Z600 or Z800 or similar. Nvidia GTS260 or GTS460 graphics card or better.
SDI Video Card Support for Monitoring
Cinegy Desktop supports the following SD/HD SDI video cards: AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Decklink family of cards, DVS Centaurus II and Centaurus II LT.
Recommended hardware: Black Magic is good value for money for this task.
Memory
Standard Definition video - at least 1GB RAM
High Definition video - at least 2GB RAM
If other applications are running on the machine at the same time, additional memory may be advised.
Graphics Card
There are no particular requirements with regards to graphics card unless the optional video output of such card is supposed to be used as a control video monitor output. Any recent graphics card from vendors such as NVidia or ATI will work. Even integrated graphics adapters as found in motherboard chipset by vendors such as Intel will work fine in most scenarios.
For HD applications the graphics adapter should be equipped with at least 256MB of memory and the memory bus width should be 128bit or better. PCIExpress graphics adapters tend to have a better memory bus performance then AGP based cards. For HD playback motherboard integrated graphics, to date, are not fast enough.
Supported video hardware for control monitor video output:
• Any VGA card that can output the DirectX overlay on video out (many ATI, NVidia and other video cards)
• BlackMagic Design Decklink series SDI video boards
• DVS SDStation and Centaurus SDI video boards
Cinegy Archive System Requirements
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The hardware and OS requirements depend on the intended availability requirements, installation size in terms of concurrent amount of users as well as the estimated database size in terms of number of assets.
Operating Systems Support
Cinegy Archive runs on the following operating systems: Windows XP 32bit / 64bit SP3, Windows 7 32bit / 64bit SP1, Windows 2008 Server 64bit SP2 .
Operating system recommendation: Windows 2008 SP2 Standard 64bit.
Database Requirements
Cinegy Archive requires MS SQL Server 2005 SP3 or MS SQL Server 2008 SP2 to be installed (not included).
Recommended SQL server: Microsoft SQL 2008 Server SP2 64 bit.
SQL Performance
The base performance of the SQL database is determined by the processor performance. As the total number of users grows and/or the size of the database itself, the amount of installed RAM and the speed of the disk I/O system and how it is configured, become increasingly important. With very large databases and many users it becomes crucial that none of these three – processor, memory or disk I/O become a bottleneck or they will cause the entire system to slow down. The following table gives an indication of what processing power is required in relation to the number of concurrent users on the SQL Server.
| Processor(s) RAM | Core 2 Duo E8400 4GB | Xeon X3430 8GB | Dual Xeon E5620 16GB | Dual Opteron 6134 32GB |
| Number of users | 1-25 | 25-75 |
up to 250 or more | up to 350 or more |
Test machines used MS SQL Server 2005 SP3 on Windows Server 2003 SP2
The number of users shown in this table is based on a Cinegy Desktop user that does a range of tasks: search, browse, edit, logging and so on. If it is clear from the beginning that there will be a very large amount of searching with complex search queries, then the performance required will be much higher.
Cinegy web portal users create less load on the database server then the average Cinegy Desktop user. Search queries from web users are serialized - queued - so in the worst case they have to wait. This is not the case with Cinegy Desktop search requests. Cinegy installations with more than 200 users have been deployed and are in use with even lower performance hardware than recommended in the table above. To be able to run the Cinegy system successfully and without performance issues the rights and roles management of the Cinegy Archive database can be used to determine which user can do what. By limiting rights to powerful features available in the system, administrators can help limit possible performance bottlenecks.
Clustering
All larger, mission critical Cinegy Archive SQL database server installations will choose the option to use the standard Microsoft clustering feature of Windows 2008 Server Enterprise (this is not available using Windows 2008 Server Standard or Small Business Server).
A cluster typically consists of two machines that form one new virtual machine. One of the cluster machines will be active and the other will be passive standing by in case of an emergency. If the active machine were to fail, then the passive machine will take over and become the active one itself. The signaling of the state of the machines is done by a dedicated Ethernet “heartbeat” cable that connects the two machines.
The outside world, the network, will not know which machine is active, as all connections are made to a virtual machine address which hides which
machine is actually active, passive or has failed. To be able to do this active/passive failover (commonly referred to as high-availability), both machines in the cluster need to use shared storage that both can access simultaneously.
This shared storage, the Quorum disk, is usually a RAID5 system that has two SCSI or FibreChannel adapters allowing both machines to be connected at the same time. The important issue to remember when building a cluster is that all components need to be cluster capable. This is especially important for the storage adapters and for the storage subsystem itself. Every major server vendor can provide a list of clustering capable hardware they sell.
When clustering two systems the amount of usable RAM is reduced to half of what the machine would have compared to a stand-alone machine. Therefore
to have a system with 16GB of usable RAM in a two machine cluster configuration 32GB of RAM is required in both cluster machines.
Hardware Requirements for a Non-Clustered Database
For a medium size archive a dual quad core or six-core processor with 2GHz or better (Xeon 56xx). 12GB of RAM. Dual Gigabit Ethernet. Separate disks for OS, database, temporary data files.
Recommended hardware: HP Proliant DL380G6 or G7 with dual Xeon 56xx processor 6GB RAM, mirrored system disk (e.g. SAS or SATA), separate mirrored disks for database and also temporary data, preferably mirrored SSDs.
Hardware Requirements for a Clustered Database
For a medium size high-availability cluster: two Windows 2008 R2 servers running MS SQL 2008 R2 configured as active / passive cluster using two dual quad core or six-core processor with 2GHz or better (Xeon 56xx). 12GB of RAM. Dual Gigabit Ethernet. Separate disks for OS and local temporary data files. Shared, external database Quorum (RAID) disk attached via iSCSI, dual host attached SCSI or Fibre channel.
Recommended hardware: 2x HP Proliant DL380G6 or G7 with dual Xeon 56xx processor 6GB RAM, mirrored system disk (e.g. SAS/SATA), separate
mirrored disks for local temporary data, preferably mirrored SSDs. HP or 3rd party Microsoft cluster certified iSCSI or FC SAN storage using SAS or SSD drives.
Disk I/O
It is always important to adhere to Microsoft’s best practices guidelines for SQL installations (available free from Microsoft’s web site). This is not as important with small installations, but when building systems for more than 30 users, choosing the right disk layout can give a considerable boost of performance at very little extra cost. For example, using different disks for temp files, log files, the database itself and so forth will improve overall throughput by allowing the system to separate these tasks to dedicated disks. When building an I/O subsystem for a database one should also remember that the read/write performance is often secondary to the number of I/Os the subsystem can perform per second. The data that is written to a database in general does not exceed 8k per write, so formatting a volume with 64k block size for use with a database is counter productive.
SQL Native Client
Microsoft SQL Server Native Client is a data access library introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008. It provides such features as database mirroring; multiple active result sets (MARS), query notifications, snapshot isolation, and XML data type support.
Database mirroring is a primarily software solution to increase database availability and data redundancy. SQL Native Client provides implicit support for database mirroring. This solution, implemented on a per-database basis, may be used as an efficient alternative to the SQL Server clustering. It keeps a copy of a SQL Server 2005/2008 production database on a standby server.
The production database is called the principal database, and the standby copy is called the mirror database. The principal database and mirror database must reside on separate instances of SQL Server 2005/2008 (server instances), and they should reside on separate computers, if possible. The production server instance, called the principal server, communicates with the standby server instance, called the mirror server. The principal and mirror servers act as partners within a database mirroring session. If the principal server fails, the mirror server can make its database into the principal database through a special process called failover. When production server rejoins the mirroring session, it becomes the mirror server and its database becomes the mirror database. For more information, please visit the Microsoft SQL server web site, www.microsoft.com/sqlserver.
