Digital Asset Management

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I’d like to think my DAM structure is pretty robust. Without going into huge detail, we mostly work on tv commercials and webseries so our assets are put in a main client folder, then sub-divided by episode or commercial, and so on.

Our per-job assets are very well managed but I have a little hiccup with global assets (libraries I use on multiple jobs i.e. royalty free music, sound effect collections, etc).

Do you keep global assets in one place and link outside of a projects structure to them, or do you copy the assets you need into your project structure? The latter creates a redundancy because I’ve now made a copy of my file.

I’m leaning more towards each project carrying around the files it needs regardless of redundancy since these assets are usually less than 5% of a project size and hard drive space is cheap.

Any thoughts?

– Angelo Lorenzo
– https://FilmsFor.Us Sell your film and connect with your audience

[Joseph W. Bourke]

Hi Angelo –

The way I do it is to keep all of my elements/ideas/unused music tracks, etc., in a master folder called Art Elements. When I use an element which I won’t use for any other client, I move it into that client’s folder. If it’s a reusable element, I just access it where it lives, then when I do Collect Files in AE, or Manage Project in PPro, that file gets “collected” into the appropriate folder.

If you get the Creative Cow Magazine, I just did an article fot the July/August issue on digital asset management with Adobe Bridge. I use Bridge to keep track of everything, with a combination of keywords, labels, and appropriately named folders.

I have received the print issue in the mail, and I would imagine that the digital version (pdf) of the issue will be published soon on the Cow website (see the Magazine tab on the masthead.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Joseph W. Bourke]

Hi Angelo –

The digital version of my article is now on the website:

https://magazine.creativecow.net/article/managing-broadcast-assets-with-adobe-bridge

I hope this helps out.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Chris Smith]

HI Angelo,
I have been reading up on your use of Adobe Bridge to manage digital assets at your station and I was wondering if you could help me with a couple of questions I have with this workflow.

I work in a mobile outside broadcast environment as a post supervisor on surfing events around the globe and am looking at a customisable system to keyword, rate and name content and card images with tight integration to our editors on Premiere. I have looked at catDV and am still looking at this as a viable option, but thought it was worth fleshing out bridge even further. We work off a sonnet RAID with to mac mini’s as metadata controllers running metaSAN to manage. Clients are connected via metaLAN over gigE.

My biggest question is related to the keywords and additional XMP metadata added to clips by bridge. In your experience has this caused corruption to any clips when accessed by other software or within the adobe environment itself? Where does this XMP metadata live? Doe sit adjust header information or anything which would take it offline, or make it unstable for use?

Just trying to wrap my head around your workflow..

Thanks
Chris

[Nick Spiropoulos]

My organization is also looking into Adobe DAM systems. We are a 70-100 person company, with 8 edit suites, a 10 person graphics department, 12 person interactive experience programming department, and we’d like to link all these departments. In addition to asset management, it would also need a tasking and versioning system. Any thoughts?

[Terence Kearns]

XMP files are plain text XML formatted files which sit alongside your assets (files like this are sometimes refered to as ‘sidecar files’ – eg, Canon EOS’ .thm files sit along side of each video clip and are JPG thumbnail files generated in-camera and contain attendant EXIF data about the video clip). Side-car do not interfere with the main asset file. External programs shouldn’t corrupt your files – period. If a tool is doing so, ditch it.

IMO, XMP files are a very welcome addition to Adobe’s workflow since XML is human readable and easily processed by the many XML capable APIs out there in the software development arena.

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/premierepro/cs/using/WSE2397406-3FEB-43df-868D-68EB20BBC021.html