Cinegy Air 22.12 and Cinegy Title 22.12 – What's New

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Introduction

Hello and welcome to the latest releases of Cinegy Air v22.12 and Cinegy Title v22.12.

My name is Simon Pilbeam and I shall be taking over product manager duties for the Cinegy Air product from Lewis' capable hands. This is my first fully responsible release as the new Product Manager of Cinegy Air (I collaborated on the last Cinegy Air release) and it has been a steep learning curve. I apologize to all those people, who have had to answer a mountain of stupid questions and deal with my strange demands and requests along the way, but here we are.

After a great deal of hard work by our development, testing and documentation teams under very challenging circumstances, we are finally ready to offer up our shiny new Cinegy Air version complete with new and interesting features and fixes as well as those all important, new-look icons and splash screens. Following hot on the heels of v21.9 R2, which for various reasons was delayed, to allow the inclusion of the new NVIDIA drivers amongst other things, comes v22.12.

In this document I shall pick out some of the highlights, but please do check out the release notes for a full list of changes and additions to the various Cinegy Air components, and please also do carefully note our recommended and verified operating systems and drivers (particularly NVIDIA driver changes and requirements which were introduced in v21.9 R2, but may still be a surprise to some, so don’t ignore the warning notes).

Major Changes

This is a list of major category changes in Cinegy Air v22.12, some of which you have been eagerly awaiting, and some you didn’t even know you needed. Enjoy, in no particular order:

  • The playout connection selection is now remembered when restarting the Cinegy Air control application, saving operators a great deal of annoyance when reconnecting after a disconnection or machine restart. Don’t fear though, you still have the option to connect to a different set of playout engines, so it is only the default offering that has remembered the previous setting.

  • HDR and SDR sources can now be played out through an HDR HLG Cinegy Air engine, and we are beginning to add the ability to select conversion LUTs (LookUp Tables) per item. These will be applied automatically where possible, or manually selected from the drop-down options within a new playlist tab.

  • On the output side, it is now also possible to configure a simulcast SDR stream from a primary UHD HDR engine, if you are feeling brave enough.

  • Fade to black is disabled for live items in the playlist (this was causing strange behavior when a live event reached and exceeded its default duration, and now prevents the fade to black by default).

  • In Cinegy Air and Cinegy Studio enhanced the ability to play out from the preview player with I/O cards. We have extended the player settings, in order to balance CPU vs GPU load introduced by Cinegy Air and Cinegy Studio control, allowing video acceleration selection. We also added additional player output options, for enhanced playlist verification:

    player acceleration

  • In Cinegy Air Playlist Editor added the ability to use audio matrix and CG settings across multiple playlists. A feature for those customers that are trying to handle multiple channels and sub-channels, across several playlists.

  • User dialog box within the Cinegy Playout Configurator created for last good frame retention on loss of live input, in milliseconds, gives the ability to choose a duration of how long to hold the last good frame before displaying color bars or emergency graphics:

    Hold last good frame

  • Cinegy Titler has been rebranded to Cinegy Title and this is not a spelling mistake!

  • At the time of going to press, it is hoped to include a Kantar integration into Cinegy Air, allowing the use of Cinegy Air as a generator of Kantar audio watermarking:

    Kantar
    Note
    		 This feature will require a license from Kantar and is an additional cost to Cinegy Air PRO. We are currently rushing through an SDK integration to facilitate this.

  • Higher frame rate (resolution) content when added to the playlist plays in Viewer/Editor, but plays out bars to air (a helpful graphical indication now appears to save your playout embarrassment when adding any higher resolution items than the current Playlist resolution):

    Indication

  • Also of interest, mainly to our USA market, but not exclusively, we have added the RossTalk Protocol, to the Cinegy Event Manager application within Cinegy Air, to help control routers and anything else using this protocol, from the playlist automatically against an item.

Those are the main Cinegy Air headlines, however.

In Other News

Cinegy Title Rebranding

My friend and colleague and the latest recruit to the product manager team, A. Burak Soyak, a product manager for Cinegy Title, and his overworked development team have been busy creating not only a brand new look to Cinegy Title, icons and splash screens, but also have moved several stages closer to adding much sought-after effects and features missing in previous versions.

This includes:

  • Adding a corner radius effect (chamfer) for a plate:

    Radius

  • New auto expanding and shrinking text background effect as formatting:

    Autosize

  • Working Canvas Area, background View Options (Solid, Transparent, Alpha). Selectable by a new button below canvas:

    WorkAreaOptions

  • A new Tile option for images within a graphics plate, to allow use of small images multiplied to make larger composite image for backgrounds etc.:

    multiplied

  • Value replacement is introduced:

    Value Replacement

  • Support option for the countdown clock to "Leave loop at the end".

  • Multiple selection functions, right-clicking multiple objects selects them into a group for simple manipulation.

  • The Smart Text box is introduced for in-text design. A highlight effect can be applied to small elements of the text, to aid with text creation, not only as a preview but also available on the output (what you see is what you get):

    highlighted-text-effects

Coupled with the various smaller fixes, updates to drivers, and more tuning of the Cinegy code, as well as customer-specific features within this release, I hope customers will see the benefits of moving up to the latest release of Cinegy Air. Do enjoy the experience and more to follow shortly.

Warnings and Caution

There are a few things that we need people to read and understand; before performing any in-place upgrades, please read and understand these statements:

  • Once a system is upgraded to Cinegy Air v22.12 from previous Cinegy Air v21.9, the settings files will be updated and will no longer be compatible with earlier versions. Please back up all settings before performing any upgrades in case of any requirement to roll-back.

  • If updating from Cinegy Air v14, please also read the equivalent section here for v21.2 before upgrading.