The DANIEL codec is primarily aimed at providing a reliable, scalable and performance optimized codec for the use of video with alpha channel. Common usage includes animations rendered with alpha channel, to be superimposed on live picture or mixed with the output of a video server.

“There is no lack of codec’s that are supposedly addressing this: Lagarith, Huffyuv, the good old Matrox VfW software codec’s and even AVID’s DNxHD codec has alpha channel capabilities. The reality until now was though: quality, speed and small file size—choose any two. But customers wanted all three—professional quality, faster than real-time playback with low performance overhead and small files. The Cinegy DANIEL codec meets all these requirements”, said Jan Weigner, Managing Director and co-founder, Cinegy.

After more than nine months of development since its inception, the DANIEL codec was first tested internally and then exposed to a wider group of beta testers doing real production environment evaluation. Cinegy now sees the time to go public and expose the DANIEL codec to the world for everyone to see and try

At IBC 2013 a free, time-limited version of the DANIEL codec will be launched that can be obtained from the Cinegy website. It is available as AVI (for Windows) or QT (for Mac OS) codec and any popular animation or effects software can use the Daniel codec for creating files.

All of Cinegy’s products have the DANIEL codec integrated by default, for example Cinegy’s automation and playout product Cinegy Air can use the DANIEL codec files for animated logos or overlays. Any software supporting AVI or QT codec’s can benefit from the DANIEL codec making workflows faster and more efficient.

A paid, commercially supported version of the DANIEL codec will be released in October 2013. A whitepaper detailing the advantages of the Cinegy DANIEL codec compared to other codec’s will be released at the SMPTE 2013 conference in LA in October.

To learn more about Cinegy’s DANIEL codec please visit Cinegy at IBC on booth 7.A30