StudioCentral Library

With more than 100 hundred small to enterprise-size SGI™ StudioCentral™ Library installations already in place worldwide in the entertainment, education and government markets, SGI today announced the availability of SGI StudioCentral Library 3.0-the first digital asset management system for enterprise-wide deployment. The powerful asset management application immediately benefits any organization wanting to better manage the creation and delivery of content. Unlike other out-of-the-box solutions, StudioCentral Library is engineered from the ground up to seamlessly scale to global, multiplatform usage; harness the content-sharing power of fiber-optic wide area networks (WANs); and rapidly integrate other off-the-shelf asset management software.

StudioCentral Library's flexible and scalable infrastructure enables customers to start with a small workgroup on a local, single server containing repository, database and content and then evolve to multiple workgroups using multiple geographically distributed servers and repositories. Assets are secured and shared between workgroups, and, with the Web-based administration tool in StudioCentral, system administrators or asset archivists can manage users, groups, assets and repositories as well as transfer assets between repositories from any desktop on the local area network (LAN)/WAN.

StudioCentral Library's new Asset Management Protocol (AMP) provides a programming language and platform independent open architecture for developers, including software development companies, application service providers (ASPs) and IT departments, to quickly build applications and services for the specific needs of their digital asset management environments. E-commerce-enabled XML output provides standard delivery of assets to third-party devices and software.

Among the digital assets that companies may need to store, share, find and play are photos, videotapes, film, graphical images and sound clips. With StudioCentral Library, any type of file can be managed, including versioned or nonversioned assets and assets that represent a variety of formats, from text files to streaming media.
StudioCentral Library 3.0 allows users to choose the right technologies to integrate into their asset management environment, including:

• Automatic cataloging and thumbnail generation for common media formats
  
• A plug-in facility for non-supported media file typing and event
  creation
  
• A versioning feature that tracks changes made to assets as they evolve
  
• Extensive data modeling for defining metadata attributes of assets
  
• Database independence, providing support to relational and
  object-relational databases
  
• Access to a variety of content servers, including filesystems,
  streaming video and audio servers, hierarchical storage management
  systems and other storage devices
  
• Kasenna™ MediaBase Player support
  
• Support for SGI Media Server™ for broadcast asset archiving
  
• QuickTime™ movie support

StudioCentral Library is a complete asset management system that can be tailored for unique organizational requirements by internal IT departments or through SGI Professional Services. In addition, SGI asset management software partners utilize StudioCentral as the base on which to build their asset management solutions.

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