This system requirements list includes recommended technical specifications for the following Cinegy software: Cinegy Ingest, Cinegy Air, Cinegy Desktop, and Cinegy Archive.
Cinegy Ingest System Requirements
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Cinegy Ingest - Supported Video Hardware
- SDI video ingest: DVS SD Station I & II, DVS Centaurus SD & HD, BlackMagic Design Decklink
- 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 fi les
- XDCAM ingest: Sony XDCAM disk (via hardware) or fi les
- RBF Ingest: DVS Centaurus I & II (LT), DVS SDStation I & II also usable (with some limitations)
Cinegy IP Gateway - Supported Video Hardware:
- Only BlackMagic Design Decklink boards are supported
Ingest Performance
The following tables give 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.
SD Ingest
| Parallel ingested formats | Core 2 Duo E840 | Core 2 Quad Q9300 | Dual Xeon 5472 | Dual Opteron 2360 |
| 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 |
HD Ingest
| Parallel ingested formats | Core 2 Quad Q9300 | Dual Xeon 5472 | Dual Xeon 5570 | Dual Opteron 2360 |
| 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 |
| Examples of Standard Definition Settings | Examples of High Definition Settings | |
| High-SD – MXF IMX 30-50 Medium-SD – MPEG2 7Mbit/s 4:2:0 long GOP Low-SD – 400kBit/s 4:2:0 long GOP WM9-One – Single stream - 128kBit/s |
High-1080i – MXF DNxHD 120/145 Medium-1080i – MPEG2 25-50Mbit/s 4:2:0 I-Frame Low-1080i – MPEG2 8Mbit/s 4:2:0 long GOP WM9-One – Single stream - 128kBit/s |
The results may vary with machines from different vendors. Factors like RAM latency are important.
Format settings can be changed by the customer to meet specific requirements.
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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Cinegy Air for Playout - 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 | |
- 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
Playout Performance
The following tables give an indication of what processing power is required to guarantee smooth playout of the respective video stream and/or Sequences with titles with effects.
| Playout Format |
Core 2 Duo E840 | Core 2 Quad Q9300 | Dual Xeon 5472 | Dual Opteron 2360 |
| 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 |
HD Playout
| Playout Format |
Core 2 Quad Q9300 | Dual Xeon 5472 | Dual Xeon 5570 | Dual Opteron 2360 |
| 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
| Playout Format |
Core 2 Duo E840 | Core 2 Quad Q9300 | Dual Xeon 5472 | Dual Opteron 2360 |
| 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 | YE |
| High-1080i | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| High-1080i with CG and FX | NO |
YES | YES | YES |
Test machines were equipped with at least 4GB RAM and used Windows XP Pro SP3
Cinegy Desktop System Requirements
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Cinegy Desktop - 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 on previous page. 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.
| Recommendations / Requirements | |
| Operating system |
Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 3 or higher |
| 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. PCI-Express 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:
|
Cinegy Archive System Requirements
Return to Cinegy Archive product page?Cinegy Archive, SQL database - Supported Hardware
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. Cinegy Workfl ow requires MS SQL Server 2005 SP3, MS SQL Server 2008 SP1 or MS SQL Server 2008 R2.
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.
SQL Performance
The following table gives an indication of what processing power is required in relation to the number of concurrent users on the Cinegy Archive SQL Server.
| Processor(s) RAM | Core 2 Duo E840 4GB | Core 2 Quad Q9300 8GB | Dual Xeon 5472 16GB | Dual Opteron 2360 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 Cineweb 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 2003 Server Enterprise (this is not available using Windows 2003 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.
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.
