Hardware Recommendations

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The performance of a machine within the Cinegy Air workflow depends significantly on factors such as the number of active channels, their resolutions, enabled inputs and outputs, as well as various settings like RTP encoding/decoding or proxy. Therefore, precise hardware recommendations cannot be provided.

Nevertheless, as we continually optimize our software tools for improved performance, we have tested the following typical configurations for our and our customers' reference. Please note that these hardware recommendations are based on previously tested older systems. The listed CPUs should be used as a guide for selecting modern equivalent options rather than strict requirements.

Cinegy products work only on machines with CPU supporting minimum instruction set SSE4.1.

Configuration Samples

Regardless of which hardware configuration sample you use from those described below, please note that after installing a dedicated graphics card, you should disable the onboard graphics card (e.g., Matrox) using the Windows Device Manager > Display Adapters and selecting the "Disable device" option for that card.

Note
 The Cinegy Title GPU acceleration and GPU encoding/decoding (NVEnc/NVDec) are supported by NVIDIA in different ways. Depending on your requirements, please contact the Cinegy Support Team to get recommendations for choosing the proper graphics card.

SD Playout Machine

The following configuration has proven to be reliably sufficient for any single-channel SD playout: Supermicro X10 series motherboard, single Xeon E5 2620v3 or Core i7 4770K CPU, 4x 4GB of DDR4 RAM, at least two separate SATA-2 SSD drives for OS and media cache (proxy) folder.

With the Cinegy Title channel branding option enabled, a dedicated NVIDIA Quadro K620 video board or better is required.

HD Playout Machine

The following configuration has proven to be reliably sufficient for an average single-channel HD playout having one SDI, one RTP streaming output, and proxy enabled: Supermicro X10 series motherboard, dual Xeon E5 2630v3 CPU, 8x 4GB of DDR4 RAM and dedicated disk(s) for Cinegy Air Network Proxy Caching Volume.

With the Cinegy Title channel branding option or GPU offloaded encoding enabled, a dedicated NVIDIA Quadro M2000 video board or better is required.

Ultra HD (4K) Playout Machine

The following configuration will play one Ultra HD channel to SDI with one animated logo: Supermicro X10 series motherboard, dual Xeon E5 2697v3 CPU, 16x 8GB of DDR4 RAM, SATA-2 SSD for OS and PCIe 3.0 SSD for media.

With the Cinegy Title channel branding option or GPU offloaded encoding enabled, a dedicated NVIDIA Quadro M4000 or better video board is required.

Multi-Channel Playout Scenarios

If multiple independent playout instances shall be configured on a single machine, please consider the matrix below:

Application

Single Xeon E5 2620v3 CPU 16GB DDR4 RAM NVIDIA Quadro K620 VGA

Dual Xeon E5 2630v3 CPU 32GB DDR4 RAM NVIDIA Quadro M2000 VGA

Dual Xeon E5 2697v3 CPU 128GB DDR4 RAM NVIDIA Quadro M4000 VGA

Recommended Number of Simultaneous Playout Instances

SD

1

4

16

SD with Cinegy Title

1

2

8

HD

–

2

4

HD with Cinegy Title

–

1

2

Ultra HD

–

–

1

For highly intensive graphics please consider the NVIDIA Quadro M4000 board or better. Newer NVIDIA boards such as the "P" Pascal series have a large performance enhancement compared with the previous "M" Maxwell series, and are therefore recommended.

Note
 Daniel2 GPU encoding/decoding performance balance is shifted compared with Cinegy Air v24.1. Daniel2 decoder is approximately 10% slower, while Daniel2 GPU encoder is approximately 10% quicker. Please carry out performance testing on your system before using Cinegy Air v24.11 if, for example, you are using media files that are encoded using Daniel2 or the Proxy feature is enabled for any Cinegy Playout engine.
Important
 If you have a recommended NVIDIA graphics card installed in your machine, you can greatly reduce CPU usage and significantly improve the overall performance of the Cinegy Air components by using the processing power of your graphics card. Please refer to the NVIDIA-accelerated Encoding paragraph below for more information.

Cinegy Title Performance

Cinegy Title is a real-time channel branding software solution, which means it needs instant access to media used in scenes and requires maximum machine performance for real-time accelerated rendering. To avoid slow frame composition, please make sure that:

  • NVIDIA Quadro board is installed into a full-length PCIe x16 Gen.2 or Gen.3 slot

  • The Power Plan in Windows OS is set to High Performance

  • NVIDIA driver is up to date and its 3D Mode is set to Video Editing

  • The "Prefer maximum performance" value is used for the "Power management mode" parameter in the NVIDIA Control Panel

  • Any media reference within Cinegy Title scenes is valid and this media is placed on a dedicated solid state drive or fast network location

In case of trouble, please ask the Cinegy Support Team to provide you with the certified benchmarking tool.

Playout Proxy Settings

Proxy volume must provide sufficient performance for concurrent read and write operations, while the majority of RAID controllers today will provide good values when only reading or writing – but not both. Therefore, we recommend using RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 with hard disks and avoiding RAID 5 or RAID 6.

With solid state disks no RAID is normally required unless this volume is going to serve multiple channels and requires better performance. If you are building the RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 volume based on SSD, please make sure that these disks are certified by the RAID controller vendor and that TRIM operation for this specific SSD make is fully supported.

SD

A RAID 0 volume of two modern SATA or SAS disks per SD channel is sufficient. No RAID is required with SSD.

HD

Please have at least 4 SATA or SAS drives in a RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 per each channel running in HD. The more drives you have, the better. Six inexpensive SATA drives will provide better performance than four expensive SAS disks. No RAID is required with SSD.

Ultra HD

To benefit from the usage of proxy workflow for Ultra HD formats it is necessary to have a proper NVIDIA GPU board. If no valid GPU is available, the Daniel2 encoder will automatically switch to CPU mode.

Please note that Daniel2 uses quite high bitrates for local cache proxy files (up to 2Gbps on High Quality 10 bit for UHD 2160p50 TV format), therefore usage of good SSD or M.2 media for UHD proxy is highly recommended.

RTP Streaming Network

If you are going to enable the RTP streaming features of Cinegy Air, it is highly recommended to split the file and streaming operations between two physically separate networks. Therefore, please consider that all your servers and workstations have two Gigabit Ethernet adapters.

Please disable the "File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks" and "Client for Microsoft Networks" options for the adapters connected to the RTP network, and uncheck the "Register these connection’s addresses in DNS" in this adapter’s TCP/IPv4 settings (see Advanced/DNS tab).

Playlist Editor/Control Stations

Cinegy Air and Cinegy Studio software control panels feature an embedded video player which requires a video adapter that supports DirectDraw and Direct3D acceleration. Today, only a few built-in server video adapters do not support it, so any dedicated video adapter should work fine.

The Cinegy Title Editor scene composition tool and Cinegy CG control application require a dedicated NVIDIA board for real-time preview purposes. Any modern GeForce should be fine, though for better experience NVIDIA Quadro K620 or better is recommended.

NVIDIA-accelerated Encoding

Note
 After installing a dedicated graphics card, please disable the onboard graphics card (e.g., Matrox) using the Windows Device Manager > Display Adapters and selecting the "Disable device" option for that card.

To optimize the performance of your NVIDIA graphics board, it is recommended to use the "Prefer maximum performance" value for the "Power management mode" parameter in the NVIDIA Control Panel.

NVIDIA RTX and other Turing-generation GPU boards no longer support interlace H.264 encoding. This applies to all versions of any Cinegy software supporting GPU encoding and is a hardware limitation of the NVIDIA boards. Pascal and earlier boards are not affected. If using GPU-accelerated NVIDIA features, please be careful to match your settings to the capabilities of your board. Instead, you may use the Daniel2 GPU encoder.

Daniel2 GPU encoding and decoding are supported by NVIDIA video boards that have CUDA Compute Capability 3.5 and higher. If the NVIDIA video board has the CUDA Compute Capability of an earlier version, then use Daniel2 CPU encoding and decoding.

NVIDIA Driver Version Updates

Due to the frequent release of NVIDIA drivers, it’s unfeasible for Cinegy to test every driver version with every possible GPU card combination to ensure compatibility with our software. As a result, we are unable to recommend a specific NVIDIA driver version for optimal performance. However, in our release notes, we highlight any issues encountered with NVIDIA drivers during our testing phase and, if they are fixed in subsequent driver releases, we provide information about the fixed version and offer recommendations for selecting the appropriate range of NVIDIA drivers. Therefore, when considering an NVIDIA driver update, it’s essential to verify its compatibility with your specific hardware and software configuration.

Cinegy Air 24.11 supports the latest NVIDIA boards which require new NVIDIA drivers and a new SDK to be utilized. For that reason, the minimal NVIDIA driver version is 456.81. Before starting any upgrades, please make sure that the OS under which you are running Cinegy Air components and the model of the NVIDIA board you are using is supported in the version of the NVIDIA driver you choose.

The NVIDIA GPU driver had an issue (NVIDIA Incident Report 4005908) where H.264 interlaced video was incorrectly marked as progressive. This issue has now been fixed starting from driver version 553.35.

If you use the older driver, you may have an issue with NVIDIA encoding initialization; in this case, you will have the corresponding message in the log file and encoding will fail.

Note
 Perform the process of NVIDIA drivers update only upon stopping Cinegy applications. For detailed instructions on installing an NVIDIA driver, please refer to the NVIDIA Drivers installation article.