Cinegy — enabling media technology
Cinegy focuses on the research and development of media and television software and technologies. Cinegy Workflow is the software platform which combines digital asset management, video ingest and software based encoding, broadcast automation and playout, production tools, archive storage & retrieval — all integrated into one seamless database driven production workflow.
The development of Cinegy Workflow began over 10 years ago, as an integrated digital archive, asset management and production environment, based on desktop PC hardware for the front-end and standard IT server equipment on the back-end, all sitting on the existing network infrastructure. This design forms the basis of today’s workflow. The work resulted in first pilots during 2001 and first commercial products became available in 2002 branded as Cinegy. The goal was to have the archive not as a mere afterthought, but as a process that starts by accumulating metadata right from the start to create a complete lifecycle as a never-ending process that keeps adding value to the media assets throughout their existence. The Cinegy platform from the start was designed as an enterprise level system that is resolution independent, storage systems agnostic, extremely scalable and absolutely open in terms of architecture. Over time, additional elements such as news integration, broadcast automation and playout have been added to the solution as well.
In order to meet the requirements of the broadcast industry, Cinegy developed new, high-end software MPEG codecs, highly scalable media asset management and collaborative software frameworks, advanced real-time media engines, real-time collaborative metadata handling and communication, heterogeneous production integration (AAF, IMX, DV, MXF, XML etc. ) and many more areas.
SQL database driven digital asset management forms the basis, taking collaboration and team workflow way beyond just shared storage. The digital asset management platform abstracts physical storage to virtual storage and in addition provides load balancing, different storage classes, storage migration, HSM integration, garbage collection, and very elaborate user access rights policies.
Cinegy licenses a number of these core technologies to various broadcast and consumer video software and hardware manufacturers that use them in their product offerings, to offer the best-of-breed solutions in the industry. Cinegy directly addresses the needs of the broadcast, television and production markets, to become the premier provider of media technology and production systems.