Cinegy

Among the most valuable assets of any media production company or broadcaster is its archive. It often represents years if not decades of labor and in some instances a national cultural heritage that, if lost, would be irreplaceable. Yet, many organizations find it difficult to capitalize on the true value of their archives because they exist in video formats, and are poorly organized, difficult to search, and subject to decay over time. The obvious solution would be to convert archived media to a digital format that would make it easy to index, instantly accessible and secure, but the time and cost involved has been, for many content owners, too great. Until now.

Over the past several years, digital storage prices have dropped dramatically. At the same time, the cost of commodity IT equipment and PC hardware has remained low, while their power has soared. As a result, a digital media archive that previously required dedicated, proprietary UNIX boxes can now be created with more capacity, greater flexibility and at far lower cost using standard IT equipment based on standard Intel CPUs with Windows or Linux operating systems. What was formerly problematic is now practical.

The Cinegy Workflow is completely database driven. No data is stored on client systems. A user logging in on any PC is presented with the same work environment as on the previous machine used. Content can be ingested from tape or file, or transferred from existing editing systems or shared storage solutions such as Avid Unity. Media is stored in a centralized repository within Cinegy Archive, accessible directly through the Cinegy Desktop client or through cinegy’s platform-independent, web-based solution Cinegy Cineweb.

Anyone with appropriate user rights can access video material and instantly view, tag or annotate ingested content. Editors and producers can work on material on the fly. Content can be accessed in parallel by any number of loggers, or any authenticated and assigned end-user. Functionality available to individual users depends on their roles and the security level they have been assigned. For example, experienced editors could have access to a different set of features and content compared with that available to production assistants.

• Cinegy Archive facilitates a collaborative workflow by allowing loggers, story editors and video editors to work on video material in real-time as it is being ingested.
• Users can access media from any location - the production office, the set or another city.
• All access rights can of course be controlled to the lowest level of detail.
• Cinegy enterprise manager allows system administrators to control and modify the operation of the Cinegy system without knowledge of complex SQL routines.
• Diagnostic tools that allow administrators to observe system status and detect bottlenecks.
• Advanced accumulative metadata collection methods.
• The Cinegy Media Cleaner can analyze media usage and then compact rolls to contain just what is in use, which is then copied to archive storage.
• Seamlessly integrates with all Cinegy Workflow products, ensuring that any metadata is accurately created, updated and maintained during every step of the production workflow.
• Cinegy’s software player and video codecs are constantly improved and updated through ongoing development, a benefit that does not pertain to other dedicated hardware codecs.

Technical Info

Cinegy Archive has a multi-tier storage concept that can work with different storage architectures which can even be mixed and matched. From simple NAS to complex HSM or combined - all options are supported. Storage can be added during operation. Using simple NAS, SAMBA or Windows Storage Server the Cinegy Archive can perform storage load balancing for increased performance. Automatic push to, or recall from, digital tape libraries controlled by HSM solutions, by vendors such as Quantum and Xendata, is also supported. The differentiation between production and archive storage allows different storage architectures for different bandwidth and volume requirements