Video transcoding and workflow automation company Telestream has extended its collaboration with video optimisation company Cinnafilm. Telestream’s Vantage media processing platform will now support Cinnafilm’s Dark Energy plug-in running on Lightspeed servers, joining Cinnafilm’s Tachyon frame mechanics and standards conversion system, already supported on Vantage.
Dark Energy is Cinnafilm’s motion compensation based noise reduction and image scaling solution. In addition to its HD-UHD solution, Dark Energy optimises images for low bitrate delivery over standard internet-based distribution networks. Dark Energy can achieve a 20-40% reduction in bitrate requirements for equivalent quality images. This capability offers the possibility of cost savings where content owners are paying on a per megabit basis to distribute or are in regions without substantial bandwidth.
The companies hope the development will help broadcasters seeking content for distribution over newly introduced 4K services and channels by helping them upscale existing HD content to create believable 4K images.
Cinnafilm technology is GPU based, which which allows the decoding, encoding and workflow functions of Vantage to occupy CPU resources while the computationally intensive features provided in Dark Energy and Tachyon are processed using the GPU. As a result, Vantage users experience a quantum progression in their ability to upscale content, especially from HD to UHD (4K), as well as optimise high resolution moving images for low bit-rate delivery through a standard internet distribution network.
Cinnafilm’s Tachyon possesses automated intelligence, capable of making decisions on how to process video on a scene by scene basis. Tachyon’s fourth generation motion compensation engine is claimed to be provide a significant reduction in low frame-rate artifacts over previous versions of Tachyon.
“Up conversion of content – initially from SD to HD and now from HD to UHD – is something that has been possible with Vantage for a long time,” said Paul Turner, VP of enterprise product management at Telestream. “It is something that Telestream does well and Dark Energy does superbly well. The integration of Cinnafilm’s technology provides Vantage customers with the very best resources at a time when there is a real demand for 4K content up-scaling.”
