As SD phases out and HD becomes a commodity, more and more 4K channels emerging and 8K broadcasts already starting in Japan. Will the race ever end for broadcasters, and are any technology investments future-proof?
   

At IBC 2016, Cinegy will answer those questions and more by showing broadcasters and media content producers how moving to Cinegy technologies can ensure they can make the resolution journey without squandering precious capital on technology obsolescence.

Cinegy’s software products for capture, playout, production, and archive - combined with its ground breaking GPU-powered encoding, decoding and processing technology - make 8K workflows possible today, and massively accelerate HD and 4K workflows.

Cinegy’s existing customer base has smoothly migrated from SD to HD and is now repeating the process in the move to 4K. At IBC 2016 Cinegy will now preview 8K-capable versions of its products that will enable early adopters to start 8K trials now.

Cinegy CTO and Co-founder Jan Weigner said, “While 8K may be still a moonshot for many, demonstrating just how easy it can be helps underscore our future-proofing message, i.e., there is an affordable answer today that costs the same for SD, HD, 4K, and, if you wish, 8K.”

Cinegy’s flexible and, importantly, open software platform is what ensures investment stability and workflow scalability. With commodity IT and clever software architected for global enterprise environments, Cinegy achieves far more than the traditional, dedicated hardware boxes that still exist in the market, and costs a lot less.

Weigner adds, “The future of acquisition and production can be whatever you want it to be, at whatever resolution works for your business using today’s commodity IT hardware.

“The debate on the respective veracity of multiple-K resolutions is almost irrelevant. In an IP, software-defined, GPU-centric environment, the upper limit of what you can usefully process in real time is difficult to define. We think our 8K demo will be impressive enough for IBC 2016. As for 2017 and beyond? Well, how high do you want to go?”

The core of Cinegy’s 8K IBC demo is the company’s DANIEL2 GPU video codec for acquisition and production, which was designed for recording from camera sources, editing, post-production, and playout. Being totally GPU-based, DANIEL2 has zero dependence on legacy codec architectures.

Using an off-the-shelf, sub-€1,000 PC, DANIEL2 can decode up to 1100 frames per second in 8K, which is 16-times the resolution of full HD.

Also at IBC, Cinegy will introduce to Europe “Cinegy as a Service”, another hardware-free way of enabling users to deploy software-defined television on cloud-based virtual machines. Cinegy’s software is being migrated in stages to cloud-based services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) enabling prospective users to test drive and ultimately deploy Cinegy software instantaneously.