Our Story

The Digital Video story started far back in time (1981). In all these years we have kept the pace of IT technology always using state of the art technologies in CGI to build products and solutions. Initially Digital Video has been fully committed to the development of Toonz (professional solution for the animation industry) .

In few years,  Toonz has become a world market leader in cartoon animation applications, leveraging the strategic partnership of distinguished partners such as Softimage, Microsoft end Avid. As per today Toonz has sold more than 4.000 licenses in 68 different countries.

Toonz Harlequin, was born from Digital Video’s experience and knowledge of traditional animation to meet the evolution of animation creative and technical standards. This main product has been sided by other products for the animation industry: among them Linetest and Story Planner.

Further on time Digital Video also developed a product-line for consumer and prosumer animation: the TAB, that is a perfect fit for web animators and for Flash users willing to enrich the animation contents of their work. The Tab product-line includes also TAB Kids and TAB Manga, that enable kids and youngsters to create animations and cartoons with amazing results, thanks to an user-friendly interface based on icons and buttons.

Digital Video has been also involved in many research projects from which it has developed state of the art technologies to be injected in the new generation of its products  (e.g. Storytelling and emotion detection technologies from Inscape and Callas (FP6 Projects), Air Traffic Control know how from Avio3D project, Virtual Actors and Virtual words from Virtual Life, etc).

Over the time, in addition to animation products, Digital Video has exploited its technology and skills in other markets such as Broadcast & Feature Film, Mobile Applications, Industry, Defense and Security, Bio-Medical and Cultural Assets.

Starting from 2009, has expanded its horizons from the world of animation to that of the film industry giving life to DDL (Digital Dailies Lab by Technicolor), product for the management of daily production in movies, and “Momentum” created for the automatic management of production processes (Workflow Manager) and for the management of video assets (MAM: Media Asset Manager).

For the development of “Momentum”  it was founded MANTRICS Srl in association with Video Progetti ( an Italian System Integrator based in Rome). during this period Mantrics has achieved exciting results and provided “core” technology to primary actors in the media world: CNN, Fox (Los Angeles), Univision, Turner, BBC are just some of the main customers acquired by Mantrics when Digital Video still held 66% of the share capital. Aside to International customers, Mantrics has proven to be successful also in Italy , providing  its solution to Fastweb, La7, La Effe, De Agostini, RAI, SKY and other minor customers.

Mantrics, that  initially operated independently , has subsequently signed an exclusive distribution agreement with an English company, leader in the broadcast market (Snell). In 2016  Mantrics has been sold to Quantel, and is currently part of Grass Valley.

Continuing on this path, in 2013 Digital Video founded the spin off company Dromic, specialized in  multi-dimensional visualization toolkit for Big Data analytics and IoT (Internet of Things) applications.

In December 2015 Digital Video group also joined the international community of Open Source developers closing with DWANGO (Japanese publisher active in the media and cell phone services) a sale agreement of the source code of Toonz Harlequin 7.1, under the condition that said code was published on Github under an open source BSD license.

The result of this sale is an Open Source version of Toonz (OpenToonz). At the same time, Digital Video, which has benefited greatly in terms of visibility for this operation, has published Toonz Premium (end-user price of less than USD 500) to provide a professional alternative to animation studios, which also includes training and support.

Last born company in the Digital Video group, is Dmtech, with the goal of creating a professional solution for Media Asset Management and Workflow Management for the film industry.

Today Digital Video still continues with its successful story in building products while at the same time keep talking with the industry to prototype and develop professional software solutions.

Our Vision

Since 1981 Digital Video is an R&D  company with a widely proven  talent in defining and developing innovative Computer Graphic products and in bringing them to the mainstream markets through strategic partnerships with specific market leaders, combining state of the art technologies with a long term global market vision  created and shared with them.

We developed  products such as Toonz (www.toonzpremium.com), a 2D Cell-animation Professional software that  has quickly become a worldwide market leader thanks to  strategic partnership  with Softimage, Microsoft ed Avid), Mantrics, an  innovative Media Asset Management and Workflow  Management solution designed for the broadcast industry and distributed worldwide with the MOMENTUM trademark by  Snell-Quantel – now part of Grass Valley –  that has integrated the Mantrics technology  in its portfolio of  solutions, distributing it worldwide to market leaders such as CNN, Turner, Sky, Univision), ecc. For the  full list of products please go to Products & Solutions.

Skills

Thanks to its long term strategic relationships  with Universities and Research Centres and the know how acquired by developing several high end products and projects, Digital Video has achieved several different and complementary skills ranging from algorithms design and implementation to large project management and market deployment.

Programming

• Development and managing of big projects ( LLOC more then 1 million);

• Development of software projects for both the professional and the consumer markets, including marketing, Q&A,

• Documentation, packaging, customer care: Windows, Linux, Mac OS;

• Multiplatform mobile Apps development (iOS & Android) and their social media integration.

• Virtual story telling.

GUI Design

• Complex user GUI design and implementation (Qt/C++, HTML5, wsWidgets, GTK+, MS Web Forms, etc.)

• Developing GUI for embedded systems (ARM based).

Real time 3D

• Real time 3D graphical projects, creation of Virtual Worlds;

Solutions

• Business intelligence solutions for planning, dynamic managing of resources, and predictive analysis (budget planning and cost analysis support);

Industry, Defence and Security

• Standard formats and procedures for train railways definitions;

• Solutions for air traffic control (human–machine interface interaction);

High performance integrated solutions for on-location jobs for Video and movie footages. (transcoding, color correction, annotation and metadating, archiving).

Languages and Environments

•  Expertise on different programming languages.C/C++, Java, Objective-C, C#, VB.NET, Javascript, PHP. Python, Lua,have been used in major projects.

•  Computer graphics & video: OpenGL, WebGL, GPU programming, SSE (Streaming SIMD EXtensions) programming, FFMPEG, DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medice) format;

•  Syntactic analysis, parsing and language design.