Silicon Philosophies announced its new Cinema Craft Ultra 4K High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)/H.265 encoder.
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Unedited press release follows:
Silicon Philosophies announces Cinema Craft Ultra™ faster than realtime 4K HEVC/H.265 encoder
Over the past 2-decades Cinema Craft© products have become the reference encoders selected by leading post-production studios worldwide. Best known for quality, ease of use and faster than real-time encoding speeds, they are much sought after for achieving pristine results and on-time delivery, however following Intel’s recent product announcement at IBC2015, all this is about to change.
Augsburg, Germany – September 22, 2015 — Following Silicon Philosophies’ 2011 acquisition of the Cinema Craft© trademark, the new owners moved to broaden the product’s user-base by entering into a development partnership with Dutch creative software company Assimilate. The integration of the H.264 encoding engine into Scratch color-grading application, helped Cinema Craft gain popularity and acceptance among this young and talented video community. Silicon Philosophies went even further by adding modifications which made the product compatible with commonly used input formats, which led to an increase in its effectiveness.
Similar collaboration with engineering partners Ittiam Systems during the past year has resulted in a series of breakthrough products, collectively referred to as Cinema Craft Ultra™, which are based on Ittiam’s i265 technology and the recently announced Intel® Visual Compute Accelerator (VCA) PCIe card.
Cinema Craft Ultra™ is Silicon Philosophies’ newest product designed for complex, HEVC/H.265 encoding computation. It provides High Dynamic Range (HDR) REC.2020 support, film grain retention, multi-pass encoding and segment re-encoding. Most significant is the adaptive bit rate (ABR) feature, which enables up to 35x variations of bitrates and resolutions to be generated in parallel from a single source. This would require lengthy processing times were it not for the VCA, which bolsters 4K HEVC processing by up to 60x frames per second. Encoding performance can be improved even further by scaling multiple VCA cards.
“Silicon Philosophies congratulates Intel on their foresight in recognizing and addressing the needs of the video processing community. Similarly, we commend Ittiam for their ingenuity to understand VCA to the extent where they’ve developed cutting-edge technology (based on its architecture) in such a short time frame”, remarked Silicon’s CEO, Miguel Clarke. “When combined with High-performance computing (HPC) hardware, VCA could revolutionize not only broadcasting, but communications on a whole”, Clarke predicts.
Silicon Philosophies have named their new products in honor of VCA developer and engineer, Tomasz Madajczak (Intel, Gdańsk Poland). They intend to deploy multiple Cinema Craft Ultra TX configurations based on VCA technology during the coming weeks targeted towards traditional video post-production, but providing over-the-top (OTT) functionalities in addition.
About Silicon: Silicon Philosophies (formerly Front Porch Video) engineered the world’s first MPEG2 encoder for Toshiba and Warner Bros in 1996. They provide customized hardware, software and workflow solutions geared towards video post-production, broadcast, internet and aviation deployed in several automated DVD, Dolby AC3, media archiving, video streaming and noise filtering applications.
About Ittiam: Ittiam Systems is a global technology company with deep R&D driven solutions for media creation, management and consumption, providing advanced media codecs, software development platforms, systems and workflows for embedded and online applications. Its solutions are at the heart of tens of millions of lifestyle products that drive mobility, content access, networking and sharing.