MUNICH/WASHINGTON DC – 5 June 2017 – Cinegy has been teasing audiences at tradeshows with 8K recording and playback demos, highlighting the performance advantages of its new NVIDIA GPU accelerated video codec, Daniel2.

The last public Daniel2 teaser occurred at NAB 2017 in April, where Cinegy showed a dual-core 13-inch MacBookPro connected via Thunderbolt3 to an external Akitio Node “eGPU“ box with an NVIDIA GTX1080 inside, which was attached to a brand new Dell Ultrasharp UP3218K 8K monitor. This setup played 8K @ 60fps – or when vsync was turned off, at up to 180fps. Another new feature that Cinegy has added to its bag of tricks is that during the realtime playback, 3D LUT-based color profiles can be applied. This provides initial professional color grading on the fly, which is not meant to replace packages such as BMD Resolve or Adobe Speedgrade but is a very useful feature to get an immediate impression of how a piece of video could look after post production.

This works on any Windows PC or notebook with a high-end NVIDIA graphics card. An 8K monitor is not required. ”Cinegy Player 3” can scale in and out as well as pan and zoom during playback, so HD and UHD monitors can be used for 8K playback. If attached screens support 10-bit color fidelity, this can also be enabled using NVIDIA consumer cards.

The teasing is finally over because Cinegy today announced that it has entered public beta with Daniel2 GPU codec-based applications. Two applications are now available for free testing from Cinegy’s Daniel2 website at www.daniel2.com – Cinegy Player 3 and an Adobe Premier export plugin, so users can create their own HD, UHD/4K or 8K output in the Daniel2 format. For those who want to try 8K playback immediately there is a small selection of 4K and 8K files on the Daniel2 website for immediate download.

Cinegy co-founder and CTO Jan Weigner said, “Cinegy’s Daniel2 GPU codec is the world fastest professional video codec, leaving any other codec light years behind. Daniel2 can decode up to 1100 frames per second at 8K, or 7680×4320 pixels to be precise, which is 16x the resolution of full HD – translating into more than 17000 frames of full HD decoded per second.”

Cinegy also has an ingest tool for live 8K recording, which was first presented at IBC 2016. It enables 60fps 8K recording and simultaneous playback of one, or multiple 8K streams while performing realtime effects, color correction, scaling and titling. The Daniel2-powered Cinegy Player 3 allows jog and shuttle, scrubbing, zoom and pan while playing at 60fps 8K or faster, again while still recording. This makes it perfect for a number of applications, the foremost being instant replay for sports. Daniel2’s bitrates and PSNR are comparable to those of AVID’s DNxHR or Apple’s ProRes.

Weigner added, “This performance secret of the Daniel2 codec is that it was architected and developed from the ground up to be GPU based. All legacy dependencies and old codec architectures were discarded. This means that Daniel2 is only compatible to itself, but the benefits of this approach are enormous and outweigh the drawbacks by far.”

The Daniel2 codec is an acquisition and production codec designed for recording from camera sources, editing and post-production as well as playout. Daniel2 is targeted at the same space in the production workflow as AVID’s DNxHR, Apple’s ProRes or Sony’s XAVC.

Weigner concluded, “A problem one faces when designing 4K, 8K or, soon, 16K systems that need to handle and manipulate multiple streams in realtime, is that even if you could decode the streams using the CPU, you probably still want to use the power of the GPU for effects and filters, which creates a system bus bottleneck to transfer the decoded streams into the GPU’s memory. This is where Daniel2 shines because it streams a fraction of the size of uncompressed counterparts that are read from disk or via the network and passed to the GPU to be decompressed faster than the uncompressed frames can be copied.

“So the Daniel2-enabled Cinegy Player 3 provides three wins at once: the system bus uses far less bandwidth; less space or bandwidth is consumed on disk or network; and the CPU is free to do other tasks as it no longer needs to decode multiple streams.”

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TECHNICAL FEATURES AND NOTES

Daniel2 GPU Codec Features

• From 4:2:2 to 4:4:4:4 color space with Alpha channel support
• Up to 64k x 64k resolution
• From 8 to 12, and 16 bit color depth
• MXF Op1A wrapped or Elementary Streams
• Up to 32 channels of 16 / 24 bit PCM audio
• Extremely low decoding latency (< 1 ms for 8K)
• Multi-generation re-compression without artefacts
• Selectable compression ratio • Adaptable, VBR, CBR, or CQ, lossy or lossless encoding
• Currently Windows 10 64bit and NVIDIA CUDA only. OpenCL version is being developed for Intel and AMD.
• CPU version for fallback purposes, e.g. VM environments without GPU. Realtime 8K encoding (8bit / YUV) on a single Intel Core i7 without GPU.

 

Cinegy Player 3 (beta) Features

• Windows 10 style media player for DANIEL2 video files and many other professional video format
• Requires NVIDIA Maxwell or Pascal GPU and Windows 64bit OS
• Native 8K output or scaled output to 4K, full HD or smaller display sizes.
• 10bit support and realtime 3D LUT support (.cube files)
• Zoom-in, zoom-out, scan & pan while playing or while paused.
• Realtime color correction and effects.
• JKL controls, single stepping, scrubbing.
• 16/24 bit Audio playback.
• Technical info and status display.
• Full screen or window playback.
• Multiple player can run simultaneously.

 

Cinegy Daniel2 Adobe Export Plugin (beta) Features

• 10 / 12 bit 4:2:2 or RGBA export – 16 bit support in later version
• MXF Op1A or Elementary Streams
• 16 / 24 bit PCM audio
• Constant Quality or Constant Bitrate – freely selectable parameters • Adobe Premiere CC for Windows 10 64bit OS Daniel2 Codec Summary
• World’s fastest production and acquisition codec
• Designed for GPUs for maximum performance
• Architected to be very conservative with GPU memory bandwidth to leave computing resources to simultaneously perform GPU accelerated FX and composing
• Currently the only way to play professional quality 8K streams on affordable, commodity hardware or even using a consumer-grade laptop
• Daniel2 Decode Performance (4:2:2 / 8bit / using NVIDIA Quadro M6000)
• HD @ 17000 fps / 4K @ 4300 fps / 8K @ 1100 fps / 16K @ 240 fps – decode to NUL device

 

Application Areas

• Post-production – massively improved throughput and faster processing
• High density multi-channel HD or 4K recording
• HFR Cinema and 8K Broadcast Acquisitions – ultra-highres HDR recording using commodity IT hardware
• High-end VR Production – ultra-highres 360 degree recording and playback
• Ultra-high-speed recording – in HD, 4K, 8K or custom resolutions
• Mobile 8K and/or multi-cam 4K editing on notebooks
• Geographic imaging – much faster processing combined with selectable compression quality ranging from lossy to lossless
• Medical imaging – visually lossless or mathematically lossless while many times faster than JPEG2000
• Video over IP for broadcast and film
• High-end KVM over IP with very low latency and better fidelity than H.264 or H.265
• Display walls and tiled multi-screen / multi-projector presentations
• AI & Computer Vision – vastly improved throughput for machine learning and computer vision

 

About Cinegy

Cinegy develops software solutions for collaborative workflow encompassing IP, capture, editing and playout services tools, integrated into an active archive for full digital asset management. Either SaaS, virtualisable stacks, cloud or on-premises, Cinegy is COTS using standard IT hardware, and non-proprietary storage technology. Cinegy products are reliable, affordable, scalable, easily deployable and intuitive. Cinegy is truly Software Defined Television.

More Cinegy Daniel2 related information and downloads at: www.daniel2.com

For more information visit www.cinegy.com or contact sales@cinegy.com

Cinegy Contact:
Marina Tamjar
marina@cinegy.com
+49 89 238853 60

PR Contact:
Becky Taylor
Manor Marketing
becky@manormarketing.tv
+44 7788 258423