As we prepare to make the journey to Vegas once more to meet clients and show off our most recent tech innovations, I’ve been reflecting on the fact that NAB 2024 will be an interesting iteration of the show for several reasons.  

It’s a large show and I think it’s fair to say that broadcast is no longer a growing market, but this is not a negative statement as we are seeing great momentum in broadcast-adjacent markets, where broadcast skills are extremely valuable and where our broadcast-born technology is in high demand. The professional AV, enterprise AV markets, and the giant markets of live sports, live entertainment and house of worship are all extremely high-value markets centering around the creation of moving pictures to feed large screens. These cannot be improvised with makeshift technology. High quality content can only be delivered using technology built on the strengths developed in the early days of broadcast, ensuring our knowledge lives on within other industries of communication at large.  

Cinegy is back in the South Hall this year, which we look forward to. The value of trade shows in the current era is the golden opportunity to meet and talk to people, but we must remain strategic.  

Cinegy thrives on customer interaction but we must remain mindful that since the pandemic, travel budgets have remained tight. Gone are the days when companies sent a large crew to Vegas for socializing purposes. We are therefore taking a targeted approach to meeting existing or new clients, a bit like a tactical operation.  

We look forward to seeing those who will come to meet Cinegy at NAB, putting a face to a name, establishing or continuing to build up the relationship of trust.  

Finally, quite bluntly, I look forward to witnessing the frenzy and fear that AI is generating in the industry. I believe a lot of people are scared by it, but Cinegy isn’t. To us it’s just another function we can bolt onto our software to provide enhancements. Automatic creation of metadata? Automatic speech detection to create subtitles? Automatic detection of problems further upstream? These things are either on their way or partially achievable and to Cinegy it’s largely deja-vu.  

25 years ago, we were warned that the DV camcorder announced the end of cinema as we knew it, but in all this time I haven’t encountered a single amateur Spielberg despite the wealth of tools at our disposal. We are in the garish phase of AI and we have to start thinking more strategically about the exact benefits of this technology instead of wasting vast amounts of resources, such as electricity, without cause. 

I like to think Cinegy has an extreme sustainability focus, we like to squeeze more out of less. Especially in the context of growing energy consumption and cooling requirements meeting rising prices for green energy for data centers. Being efficient and squeezing more power out of the same hardware increases efficiency by 50%, which delivers an immediate benefit to our customers.  

Our original vision was to do away with the endless amounts of proprietary boxes and cables needed in the broadcast center, instead folding them into a software stack all way to 8k and beyond. We have achieved that and because we offer a single stacked pipeline in a single CPU, we have minimal latency from end to end and the only limitation is providing enough hardware power to drive the software stack. 

We are one of the most established broadcast software companies on the show floor, our team has decades of combined experience, and we look forward to showing off our latest technology announcements, including  upgrades to the Cinegy Air 24.1 platform that provide more security in operation, tweaks to the Cinegy Capture 24.1 ingest platform to make it more stable for live high-stakes events, and new features for the Cinegy Multiviewer 24.2 that boost its power and streamline its use. 

We are also showing our new Cinegize remote workstation solution for remote workflows and the latest updates to our video codec stack Cinecoder, which powers not only our own video encoding and decoding.  

Finally, our Daniel2 high-end production codec, the world’s first video codec designed ground-up for GPU acceleration, sees a new release at NAB 2024. The speed has been improved from insane to totally bonkers, as the brits would say. 

The decode speed for some scenarios has tripled, so we can now boast the surreal number of 7300 frames per second of 8K 4:2:2 decoding using a NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU. This is proper decoding with writing to GPU RAM. This equates to 29200 FPS @ UHD, or 116800 FPS @ 1080P or finally around 600000 FPS SD. As a yardstick: a 90-minute-long movie has around 130000 frames, which we now can decode (in HD) in 1.1s. Of course this is more of an academic exercise, but feeding AI engines and GPU pipelines with a GPU native codec that is scalable in terms of speed, resolution and quality has never been more important than now. Even hardware-based encoders and decoders found on GPUs high-end GPUs are slow as a snail in comparison. We have been working on this for soon a decade and have been showing it as a “Cinegy Youth Science Fair” exhibit at tradeshows over the years. Now this is coming into its own.  

AI is GPU. GPU video codecs is Daniel2. 

We look forward to seeing you at NAB Show 2024 and discussing how Cinegy’s solutions can benefit your business. 

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