Cinegy announced the introduction and immediate availability of Cinescore, the first industry relevant benchmark for the meaningful measurement of video encoding performance for commonly used broadcast and professional production video formats.
   

The move from proprietary video hardware to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technology has changed the media and broadcast industry. CPU-accelerated, graphic-card equipped commodity machines powered by Intel processors are at the heart of modern video and broadcast systems. Yet it is still difficult to quickly and accurately measure any machine’s actual video processing performance.

Cinegy co-founder and chief technology officer Jan Weigner said, “The industry has been waiting for a tool like Cinescore, which provides a simple way to assess the video processing performance of any given machine. 

“Although there are many benchmark tools that provide general ideas of system performance and comparison, there have been none specifically designed for the broadcast industry, until now.” 

Video is the primary payload of broadcast. It is encoded, decoded, transcoded, and edited; and is further manipulated with the addition of graphics and effects, not to mention the effect export or streaming tools can have. Cinegy Cinescore accurately benchmarks a wide range of commonly used formats and codecs by measuring the encoding speed and the load that encoding places on a system for different target resolutions, e.g. SD, HD and UHD.

Weigner added, “The broadcast industry needs benchmarks that are accurate, relevant, and allow quick comparisons, which it did not have in any meaningful sense. Cinegy Cinescore uses a combination of professional- quality codecs to measure the encoding speed of a system and determines a system score – the Cinescore. It provides a reliable indication of how many channels of a particular video format a given machine can capture; how suitable it is for HD or 4K editing; or what transcode speed to expect from a newly purchased server.”

In order to immediately categorise the measurement results, Cinegy Cinescore includes comparison results from a range of low-, medium- and high-performance machines. This can help identify performance bottlenecks of an existing system, and suggest potential issues with cooling, BIOS or OS energy profile settings that may require attention. 

Cinegy Cinescore is a portable application, meaning it requires no installation. All a user has to do is to download and unpack a small ZIP file, and double click on the Cinescore application to start testing immediately. No administration rights are required, and no system cleanup is necessary once completed, which makes Cinegy Cinescore very quick and easy to run on any Windows 7 or newer machine. If preferred, Cinescore can be run from a USB stick or from a shared network location, in which case measurement results can be saved and shared for comparison with other machines on a system.

Weigner concluded, “Cinegy Cinescore is yet another free tool that can be download from our website, all of which are designed to lead efforts to arrive at common benchmarks that further the ability to advance non-proprietary best practices for every applicable organization in our industry.”

The Cinescore benchmark software is free and can be downloaded from Cinegy’s website.