Need for Industry Benchmarks

The move from proprietary video hardware to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) has changed the media and broadcast industry. Commodity machines powered by Intel processors and equipped with GPUs for graphics and compute acceleration are at the heart of modern video and broadcast systems. There are also many benchmarking tools that provide a general idea of the system performance of a system and that allow its comparison with other systems. In stark contrast the broadcast and media industry is largely fact free. None of the existing IT benchmarks have direct relevance to the broadcast and media industry. The main payload of broadcast and media is video. Video is getting encoded, decoded, transcoded by capture, edit, graphics, effects, export or streaming tools. Cinegy Cinescore covers a fair number of commonly used formats and codecs and measures the encoding speed as well as the system load for doing that for the different target resolutions - SD, HD, UHD and 8K.

The Score

The measuring results are compounded into system performance scores – one for CPU performance and one for GPU performance (currently NVIDIA only). These are the Cinegy Cinescore numbers for CPU or GPU. The Cinegy Cinescore numbers make it very easy to compare systems and to judge whether a given machine is powerful enough for a certain task or what throughput to expect.

Performance Comparison

To be able to immediately categorize the measurement results, we include results from other low, medium and high performance machines. This can quickly indicate performance problems and hint at possible issues with BIOS settings or energy profile settings that may need addressing. Users of Cinegy Cinescore have found that insufficient cooling made their CPUs automatically throttle the speed.

No Installation Hassle

Cinegy Cinescore is a so called “portable” application. This means no installation is required. Just unpack the Zip file and double-click the application icon to start Cinegy Cinescore. No administration rights are required; no system cleanup is necessary should you want to get rid of it. This makes it very easy to quickly run Cinegy Cinescore on any 64-bit version of Windows 7 or newer Windows OS equipped machine. Run Cinegy Cinescore from a USB stick or from a shared network location where you can then also save the measurement results if you want to compare all of your machines with each other.

Free

Cinegy Cinescore is free. We want to further the efforts in this industry to arrive at common benchmarks and best practices. Cinegy Cinecore is one of our contributions to that cause with many more to come.

Not the Answer for Everything

Cinegy Cinescore looks at one key aspect of your systems performance but there are many other factors. Depending on your system architecture storage speed, network throughput, RAM capacity, bus bandwidth and so on may all be bottlenecks that need to be addressed. There are other benchmarks analyzing these factors.

• Industry relevant encoding performance benchmark for professional video and broadcast
• Comprehensive score card and compound score to compare system performance
• Measures system encoding performance for SD, HD, UHD, and 8K using professional codecs
• Works on systems running Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 2012 (R2) Server, or higher
• No installation – immediately executable, portable binary – run it from your USB stick
• Free

Cinegy Cinescore System Requirements

The minimum OS version required is Windows 7 SP1 64-bit. Recommended is Windows 10 64-bit.
Installation of .NET Framework 4.6.1 or later is required before being able to run Cinegy Cinescore. 

Cinegy Cinescore Encoding Formats

Current profiles sets for SD, HD, UHD, and 8K test suites available for Cinegy Cinescore analysis are as follows:

Download your free copy of Cinegy Cinescore 10.4.

Cinegy's professional video encoding benchmark.

Learn how to use Cinegy Cinescore following the link to our online documentation:

• Cinegy Cinescore User Manual