- How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
- You recently started a blog and podcast about Digital Asset Management. Can you tell us more about this?
- What advice would you like to share with DAM Professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: [0:01] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Dave Ginsberg.
Dave, how are you?
Dave Ginsberg: [0:10] I’m doing well, Henrik. Thanks for having me on.
Henrik: [0:12] No problem. Dave, how are you involved with Digital Asset
Management?
Dave: [0:17] I work at a studio in Los Angeles, and I oversee all the technology
for our marketing group. Marketing’s interesting in that we’re almost like a mini
case study in production and post workflows. We deal with all the same issues
everyone in media does. Things like limited dry space resources, tight deadlines,
the need to be more efficient, and, most of all, the need to be more cost
effective in how we do things. [0:39] DAMs allow us to take repetitive tasks and
automate them with metadata so we can leverage the assets we create between
the different groups that we service. We can go into our DAM and find assets
we might have forgotten about or just something that we could take one asset,
another asset, and merge the two together.
[0:55] Oftentimes, we find ourselves doing slight changes rather than making
something new whenever our clients need something, and obviously that can be
very cost effective.
[1:03] Our DAM also allows our clients to service themselves directly. If they
need a file type that they didn’t originally request or they need more copies,
they lost their original copy, they can go into our system and create whatever
they need from the master mezzanine file, which is very, very high quality. They
can make anything they need from a web resource all the way out to a HD-type
quality.
[1:25] They just do it right in the system themselves, so we found just a lot of
efficiencies moving into a DAM, and we’re excited to move into the world of file based
workflows.
Henrik: [1:35] You originally started a blog and a podcast about Digital Asset
Management. Can you tell us more about this?
Dave: [1:40] Sure. I started a website called ElegantWorkflow.com. I started
thinking about it a couple years ago. I was researching DAM, so file-based
workflows, getting on the Internet, and looking all around. There really weren’t
a lot of sites out there at the time. I know that there’s a few more now, but still
it’s not something where you go into Google and 40 sites pop up. It still seems
to be a really new technology that people are interested in. [2:11] What I wanted
to do was create a place where I could impart what I have learned in my journey
in this arena, and I work underneath the finance and operations umbrella
where I’m working out. I see things very differently from where a programmer
or an engineer might look at how to build a system. I wanted to be able to pass
along what I had learned as well as interview some of the top industry people
out there.
The site’s really taking off, and it’s also a lot of fun to have a nice relaxing conversation
with somebody that I would normally meet on a floor at NAB
[2:36] and have two minutes or five minutes with them or be in a
meeting where they’re presenting something to me to having a relaxed chat
where we’re talking between 20 minutes and an hour.
[2:55] They can really dig into the meat and potatoes of what they want to talk
about and impart what they’ve learned in what their business or their technology’s
all about.
Henrik: [3:06] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Dave: [3:12] My advice for DAM pros and people aspiring to get into this industry
is to learn as much as you can about everything. If you’re an engineer
or a programmer, learn about finance and production. If you’re a producer, try
to learn about programming and technology. [3:27] I think for everybody, we
all need to learn about library sciences, metadata, and also how users look for
information because I think that there’s a lot of great systems out there, but they
could be even better if people really took the time to figure out how does the
average user look for something? What’s the different between how an editor
would be searching for something based on his or her needs versus someone
who’s a producer, an associate producer, or a researcher?
[3:56] The more you can see things from other people’s perspective, the better
you can build the systems and most of all the better metadata structures we can
all build because it still is a relatively new technology, a relatively new arena for
everybody. There’s so much we can all learn from each other. I think the more
you can just see through another person’s eyes, the better all these systems can
be and the better we can all do our work.
[4:22] Most of all, I think the goal for everybody is getting home and having a
home life and not sitting in the office looking for a file for three days when you
should just be able to go into a DAM and pull it up within three seconds.
Henrik: [4:35] Great advice. Make sure you get out of your specialty, and make
sure you get out of your comfort zone.
Dave: [4:40] Exactly, and just really embrace technology. There’s a lot of amazing
things people are doing out there. Through websites like your website,
Elegant Workflow there are a number of these sites starting up you can really
get a feel for what everybody else is doing, and most of all I love when people
tell me about what they would have done differently. [5:01] In every interview, I
always like to ask, “If you were doing this all over again knowing what you know
now, what would you do differently?” Some of the answers you get are not even
close to what you would expect. Sometimes it’s really basic small things that
people got so excited to go build a DAM and they didn’t think about how it was
going to be used all the way to crazy metadata structures that people want to
employ that I don’t even think we have the technology yet for.
Henrik: [5:28] Great points. Thanks, Dave. [5:29] For more on this and
other Digital Asset Management topics, log onto AnotherDAMblog.com.
Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom, iTunes and the Tech Podcast
Network. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at
AnotherDAMblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
Related Articles
- Another DAM podcast interview with Jill Hurst-Wahl (anotherdampodcast.com)
- Elegant Workflow (anotherdamblog.com)
Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts, RadioPublic, Spotify, TuneIn, and wherever you find podcasts.
Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?
Another DAM Consultancy can help. Schedule a call today
Another DAM Podcast 