(no subject)

[growler_south]

I'm learning about Digital Asset Management- basically software which catalogues and organises all your images, videos, and files, wherever they may be, and offers quick and easy searching. Great for us here, where we have vast, disorganised librarie of images, textures and footage, and no-one can quite remember where everything is.

Unfotunately, this seems to be a new and exciting field, and so I'm wading through enthusiastic but pointless newspeak. I dont WANT to leverage and monetise my diverse portfolio, nor do I want to experience a synergistic environment for structuring the flow of media assets. You can take your powerful transformations and enhanced management capabilities and stick them right up your documentation platform, for all I care. All I want to know is:

Will it make finding stuff easy?

Comments

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Well... all of them I'm aware of still require human input. Clever software can determine what kind of file it likely is, dimensions of an image and other parameters of the data ... but it can't know that X.jpeg is a picture of a butterfly and Z.avi is a video clip of a biker bear pissing on a club prospect unless the item has been properly keyword tagged.

If the system is good, it will require a login (or interface with an existing login system) so anyone who does NOT tag items they submit into the system can be beaten about the head and shoulders (or whatever) until they do so.

[mathan.livejournal.com]

I used to work for North Plains Systems which is the leader in DAM.

What it boils down to is metadata. For each asset you have metadata that you enter upon import. The metadata you have to create. So what kind of information do you want to search on, track, report on,

Different organizations will use different types of information depending on the asset - text files, Adobe Illustrator, images, music files, etc...

[growler-south.livejournal.com]

Basically we generate huge numbers of files: images, textures, animations, 3d models, motion capture files, vector art, logos, audio, inspirational showreels- so basically we need something that can store and track metadata on even unrecognised files, ready for searching later.

The main issue is knowing that a particular asset exists, but finding it in the giant backup library would take longer than just going out and making it again.

A secondary issue is finding a specific file when a client requests it- because usually the client doesnt know much more than a vague date, and us having no way of searching by client, job, or key number (as that's not how we organise our backups)

Something simple then. No collaboration or version management, just a nice simple database that tracks files. And displays them on a web page so anyone on the network can upload, search and retrieve.

oh and leveraging the monetization of our digital asset documentation platform is strictly optional.

Any ideas?

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

If your needs are that simple... you might be able to get away with Filemaker Pro - a record can contain a binary object of mindboggling size (I forget how big offhand, but it's big). Or, as I recall, it can simply store a pointer to the file, if you like. (I haven't gotten into this aspect of FMPro yet - I've been working on other projects.) One of the examples available for download from their website is a basic asset tracker.