Media Management: Covering Your Assets

Media asset management answers the need to control and access a rapidly increasing variety of digital media formats.

By Jim Frantzreb, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Avid Technology, Inc.

The lifeblood of a content creation organization is media and the metadata that describes it. The ability to find, sort and retrieve these elements is an increasingly vital element for smooth and efficient production. For many organizations that produce video and audio for their own use, important opportunities for revenue enhancements and cost savings from re-purposing media are possible only to the extent that media can be found, organized and retrieved.

At the same time, the growing acceptance of nonlinear editing and digital media production, along with the ability for many users to gain instant access to very large amounts of media in shared storage systems, adds to the need to effectively and simply manage media.

Metadata key to info management
Digital media asset management tools are increasingly being adopted by organizations involved with content creation, to help meet the challenge of finding and tracking media during and after the production process. These tools are generally based on sophisticated data base engines and are able to track media assets, usually regardless of the media type. The systems do not actually touch the media – they manage and manipulate the descriptive information about the media, called metadata. Metadata is information that describes information, such as the media's format, length, source, location, ownership, etc. The extent to which applications can share metadata – and the asset management system's ability to use it – are critical for a successful enterprise-wide media asset management system implementation.

One of the biggest problems for asset management systems has been an inability to gain access to the rich descriptive metadata embedded within the editing and graphic applications. If the available set of metadata is limited, the functionality of the asset management system may be restricted, say, to a few fields of the most basic information such as name, location, and program length.

One would like to have more information, such as Tape ID, Last Modification Date, or details about the video and audio characteristics, for example. The good news is that media file format standards such as the emerging AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) have helped to greatly extend the ability of different applications to exchange metadata, and to allow interoperability and with asset management systems.

Some vendors are taking additional steps. For instance, in 1998 Avid Technology introduced the Open Media Management (OMM) initiative, an cooperative venture between Avid Technology, Inc. and asset management vendors IBM, SGI, eMotion, and Bulldog to define an interface for external asset management tools to transparently query the Avid media file and metadata structure.

Analyze your needs
While media asset management systems are becoming more essential, more affordable, and much more useful, these systems can be a serious investment - not just in terms of the initial investment, but in terms of the time and logistics required for a thorough implementation. A variety of asset management systems are available, and all have significant differences, stemming from different design goals or focus on solving a particular set of media organization problems.

For example, an asset management application may have exceptional cataloging, and rich, extensive querying capabilities that are ideal for browsing the media assets of a large enterprise. Yet that same tool may prove to be awkward and unnecessarily complex in a high-throughput postproduction or broadcast environment, where each keystroke counts, and where a concise minute-by-minute inventory of media assets is essential.

Organizations seeking to implement an asset management solution should consider the following guidelines:

1. Understand exactly what you expect of the asset management system, now and in the future. What is your core business? Will the asset management system improve your workflow or make your service more valuable to your customers?
   
2. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of various asset management systems. Ask for customer references, and speak to them. Is their application and organization similar to yours or is it quite different?
   
3. Speak to the vendors of your creative applications. What asset management systems to they recommend? Not only may they have some valuable insight, but an increasing number of editing system vendors offer asset management that may prove to be the best fit for your needs.

As collaborative content creation environments with enormous capacity become commonplace, the need to effectively find, manage, and use media assets grows. Media asset management tools can speed job cycles, allow greater utilization of media assets, and will increasingly become the essential "control center" tools of the professional digital media content creation organization.