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Another DAM Podcast interview with Jay O’Brien on Digital Asset Management

Jay O’Brien discusses Digital Asset Management

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 Jay O’Brien.

Jay, how are you?

Jay O’Brien:  [0:09] I’m doing great. How are you?

Henrik:  [0:10] Great. Jay, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Jay:  [0:14] In my role at the Baltimore Ravens, I’m the director of broadcasting and stadium productions. I fell into the Digital Asset Management role here. I started 11 years ago here as an intern, just logging tape, doing tape‑to‑tape editing and logging tape in the…I think it was AVID media logger.

[0:35] I got very good at Digital Asset Management in terms of typing out every single play of every single Ravens’ game. That’s how I became a stickler for asset management and also became a football fan.

[0:47] I say I fell into it, because Digital Asset Management, as I’ve advanced through the Ravens and now I’m in charge of the broadcasting department, we were faced with a situation where we basically had to make a move. The previous system we’re on was at its end of life and it was, of course, going to be a big investment to upgrade.

[1:06] I took on the role of learning as much as I could about all the new asset management systems that were out there. It’s pretty exciting. It’s not something I thought I would be interested in but I’ve been working with some great people at other teams, and with our consulting group that we used to implement this new system that we’re on.

[1:24] I’ve really learned a lot and there are some great people in the field like yourself who’ve been very, I guess, instrumental in helping me to learn as much as I can about this. Now, I wouldn’t in any respect call myself an expert. I’m an intermediate novice in this whole thing and learning more about it every day.

[1:38] Our primary objective here is to create great content. When we made this change, I guess more involved in automating our Digital Asset Management, helped us to get away from the tedious typing out every player’s name and to actually editing content.

Henrik:  [1:53] How does a football team use Digital Asset Management?

Jay:  [1:57] It’s pretty interesting. For an NFL team, there are actually two different video departments that are using Digital Asset Management for two completely different purposes.

[2:06] We have a coaching video department which is using Digital Asset Management to record every play from practice and every play from the games so that our coaches can then go through to analyze the plays for teaching and to get ready for future opponents and that type of thing.

[2:22] What my department does is more on the entertainment side. We create television shows that air in our local market here in Baltimore and Washington, DC, also on our team’s website and mobile app and iPad app and all that kind of good stuff. Then, we also create all the entertainment at our home games on our big screens and our ancillary video boards.

[2:47] What we’re using Digital Asset Management for is to capture all the footage that we shoot at practice, at games, off the field with our players doing work in the community and that sort of thing. We’re using Digital Asset Management to capture and tag all that media so that it’s very easily searchable for us.

[3:11] You don’t know that you need a shot until you need a shot. We were working on a feature this past season about our old national anthem singer who sang national anthem for the first 18 years of our franchise. We had logged the first game that he sang the national anthem.

[3:29] While you’re logging and tagging that asset, you’re probably thinking to yourself “When am I ever going to need this?” But you eventually do. I’m sure that the people that are for us doing a lot of loggings sometimes are thinking “Wow, they’re never going to use this clip.” Surprisingly, we often do.

[3:45] With a team that’s now in our 20th season of existence like the Baltimore Ravens, we’re getting to the point now where we’re doing a lot of look backs and in‑a‑moment‑in‑time of the most famous plays and players in our history. Without a robust Digital Asset Management system, we wouldn’t be able to create the content and the quality that our fans demand.

Henrik:  [4:06] Jay, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Jay:  [4:10] For us, the biggest challenge is, with this new system that we have, we’re utilizing the Levels Beyond Reach engine. But it gives you the chance to create as many metadata fields and as many metadata keywords as you want.

[4:24] That’s the challenge and the success of the new system. You want to be able to search by all sorts of different tags. You also don’t want to create too many that you get bogged down with it or that the tagging process takes such a long time that it becomes not very worthwhile.

[4:43] That was our big challenge with this new system. Now going back in time, before you were able to tag metadata using drop down menus and things like that, everything was manual. You were typing everything out. At least, we were.

[4:58] For example, we had someone logging for us back 10 years ago who spelt a certain player’s name wrong for the entire season and nobody caught it. That’s a big challenge because when we’re searching for that player’s name and we’re thinking, “We know this player had good plays during the year. Why aren’t any of them showing up in our asset manager?” It was all just because of a misspelling.

[5:19] That’s a challenge that we’ve certainly overcome now with this new system where we can easily load an Excel roster of our players and then you type in the first letter or two letters of the player’s name and you move on. This new system has saved us a lot of time.

[5:32] At the same time, when we were first establishing the system and determining what fields and what key words we wanted, I think at first we may have gotten too overly ambitious of creating so many different fields that it was taking longer for the first few weeks of our season to log our games and not less time, which is what we anticipated going into the season.

[5:54] We were logging everything from what color jerseys our players were wearing, what the weather was like. It’s really just trying to be ambitious without being overly so where it’s really costing you time and not saving you time.

Henrik:  [6:07] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Jay:  [6:12] When we went through the process of choosing a new asset manager, we demoed as many of the new systems as we could. We also spoke with, in our case, other football teams that we knew had made this transition to a new system or teams that we knew were as robust as we are in terms of the amount of content we produce.

[6:33] Reach out to other people. Demoing is great and that was certainly helpful for us to demo every system we could. It was equally important for us to talk to people who have actually used the system, specific to our needs.

[6:46] We talked to some people who were using the system we went with and other systems but whose objectives are different than ours. What system may work for a sports team may not work for somebody who’s doing news programming or something like that.

[7:02] Reach out to as many people as you can who you think would be using the system for similar purposes. In our case, we leaned heavily on our consultant and integrator during the project to have them connect us to other sports leagues and organizations who we knew would be using the system for somewhat similar purposes.

[7:22] As I said before, as much as you can, figure out in advance what types of fields and key words you would like to use and have that all laid out. In our circumstance, we’re still evolving and we’re still adding metadata fields and key words and we’re removing some too. Don’t be afraid to do that and say, “This one is unimportant. We don’t really need this.”

[7:44] Those would be my two pieces of advice. It’s certainly a learning experience. This will be our sixth game of the season coming up. Just now we’re starting to get really into a flow and using the system in a way that is most beneficial to us.

Henrik:  [8:00] Thanks, Jay.

Jay:  [8:01] Thank you. Anytime.

Henrik:  [8:02] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics go to anotherdamblog.com. For this and 170 other podcast episodes, go to anotherdampodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to reach out to me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with David Klee on Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • How does the broadcasting organization use Digital Asset Management?
  • 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 Klee. Dave, how are you?

Dave Klee: [0:09] I’m doing well, Henrik. How are you?

Henrik: [0:10] Good. Dave, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Dave: [0:14] Well, I actually read one of your earlier blog postings about making your elevator pitch, so I’ll give you mine so far. I’m a systems engineer, working in media asset management at NBC, so most of what I do focuses around organizing video files for NBC News. [0:30] Whenever you see old footage that shows of up of, maybe, a politician saying something contradictory, or some major event that’s happened in the past, I work on the systems that help people within the company find that stuff and put it into stories that they’re working on for the news. [0:45] As you can imagine, those systems are pretty big and complicated, so they need a lot of attention, and I work on a team that helps support them and figure out how to make them work better.

Henrik: [0:53] How does a broadcasting organization use Digital Asset Management?

Dave: [0:56] Well, there are a lot of uses within NBC, and I’ll only speak to the ones I know about. There are some things on the distribution side, obviously, that I don’t work with very much. People when we’re done making a TV show or a program, we’ll ship it off to someone else, and usually in many different formats, and a variety of different ways, so we have systems to facilitate that. [1:17] Also, when making TV programming, we’re working a lot with collateral material or things that would support that programming, so you might have graphic design for a website, or DVD material, or a billboard, or an advertisement. We have systems that help facilitate that, that I don’t work with very much. [1:33] What I do is really work with NBC News, and when I say, “News,” I mean “Nightly News,” anything that happens on MSNBC, the cable channel, the “Today Show,” and then some of our longer shows, the news magazines like “Dateline” and “Rock Center with Brian Williams.” [1:49] In these systems, there are really two major things we’re looking to accomplish with Digital Asset Management. First and foremost, it’s to enable daily editorial workflow, to let people get through the day, and also to build a longterm catalog and archive. I can briefly talk about what those mean, and I think it’s very interesting, because there are some tensions between those. [2:11] First of all, for a daily editorial workflow, it’s a big place, so there are a lot of people working on a lot of different things, as you can imagine, and we need systems that can tie people together, to allow them to collaborate, and share information, and share core footage, underlying what they’re working on. [2:30] A lot of times, things will end up being used across our different platforms. We might have a story that’s developing throughout the day on the cable channel that will incorporate a small piece with the nightly news, or we might have a small piece on the nightly news that ends up becoming a larger piece on one of the news magazine shows like Rock Center. [2:49] We need systems that help people work together, share footage, and we have producers working with editors. Sometimes, we have multiple video editors working on the same project. We just need systems that really facilitate that workflow and get people working together. [3:05] On the other side of things, we’re working on a long-term catalog and archive. Like, I’d imagine many broadcast organizations, we started with a lot of footage on film. Over time, this footage on film got migrated to videotape. Over time, the old videotapes got migrated to new videotapes. Now, we’re taking these videotapes and starting to put them into a centralized system, a centralized repository so that people can find them in the future. [3:36] As we’re doing that, we’re working on cleaning up the metadata because over time, metadata entry was done by many different people and manipulated in many different ways when things moved from one system to the other as you can imagine. There’s a lot of metadata cleanup that’s done during this process. [3:54] Then, there’s new footage, too, that’s constantly coming in. A lot of the new stuff that comes into the building comes in on satellite feeds from all over the world, and so we need some people who are sitting there adding metadata and cataloging things that are coming in in real time. [4:08] This footage is used both in future programming and sometimes, it’s sold to other people because one of the things we can do is license this footage. We need to keep track of rights and what we own and what we’re able sell to other people so when people are making other documentaries or TV shows or films, they may come to us looking for footage. [4:31] I think these two different things, the long-term cataloging and the short-term workflow, are really interesting because they have such different needs. I think there are really a few key conflicts or tensions that we have to think about and work on when we’re trying to support these systems and when we’re trying to fix them and build new ones. [4:54] One of the main ones is accessibility versus security. For daily workflow, we really want assets to be as accessible as possible. We want people to be able to get whatever they might need to get their job done, but in the long-term, you generally want to carefully want to manage your permission structure and make sure that people only get access to the stuff that they should have access to and prevent people from doing things that might be bad like accidentally deleting assets or changing metadata when they shouldn’t. [5:25] If you think about it in terms of a physical place, a building with doors, for the daily workflow, you might really want everyone to have the doors open and people just get wherever they need to go. But, for this long-term archive, you want carefully give out keys and carefully control which keys open which doors, so people only get access to the stuff that is appropriate. [5:47] That’s a real tension. Another big one is speed versus safety. For the daily workflow, you want people to get access to things as quickly as possible, and you want that to be a seamless process. We need systems that are fast enough to be able to grab something while it’s recording, put it into a project, and then ship it off to be played back on the news. [6:09] But that process flies in the face of building systems that are extra safe, because the safer systems aren’t necessarily the fastest systems. When you have a long-term archive, if you really want it to be safe, you want to put things on the safest media you can, but often the safest media is the slowest. [6:26] Another big tension for us is flexibility versus reliability, or maybe flexibility versus consistency. A lot of different people in the building, and you want to allow people to work the ways that they work best so that they can get their jobs done. That means you need to be flexible in daily workflows, but at the same time you really want to produce consistent results for this archive. You want metadata that’s full and complete, and you want things to be very consistent for the long term. [6:54] That’s a big tension for us. The last one I’ll mention is usability versus quality. Ideally, and this is very true for video files, you want the highest possible quality video file in your archive, but there’s a price to that. The highest quality video files not only can be very big, which makes your system much more expensive, because you have to build in extra storage and extra bandwidth to accommodate such big files. [7:22] It can also be complicated when you’re dealing with the highest quality files, because often these are original files that came right out of a camera, and many different cameras use many different types of video files. The video world is very fragmented when it comes to types of video. If you put the original video file, which is arguably the highest quality, into your archive, you may be dealing with a file format that doesn’t exist in a few years, or a file format that’s very complicated to get into the system that want to use it in. [7:55] You end up with these very complicated workflows that make the system less usable. By streamlining a system on just a few codecs, a few types of video, and making them compressed or standardized in a certain way, it can make the system much easier to use, much easier to build. But that’s a real tension that we’re always trying to figure out, because the archival aspect demands quality, and the workflow aspect really demands usability. [8:25] These tensions, I’d imagine, are in a lot of different technologies, but I think they’re just amplified in a big broadcast news environment, because there’s a huge difference between how the fastest system would perform and the safest system. Small choices you make in different types of video formats would demand a whole different type of architecture. [8:45] Really, we need, for the broadcast world, systems that can serve both masters. We need a short-term fast and flexible workflow enabling tool, and we need a long-term, secure, high quality, centralized repository. Both those things need to happen, and I think that provides some interesting challenges and some opportunities.

Henrik: [9:05] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Dave: [9:09] For people who are DAM professionals, I’ve actually listened to some of your other podcasts, I wouldn’t necessarily purport to have any advice to offer them. I’ve gotten some useful tips from the ones I’ve listened to. But, for people looking to get into it, or looking in from the outside, I can tell you there are a few things that have really helped organize my thinking around Digital Asset Management since I’ve gotten into it. [9:31] One of them is about these choices that you have to make, and understanding that Digital Asset Management, once you really get into it, I think is about making some tough choices, often between two different things that are right, but they can’t both be right at the same time. Successful organizations are the ones that, at the outset, do a lot of self-analysis, really look at what the organization needs and wants, and take times to discuss these tradeoffs, because not only does that help you build a better system, but I think that helps you build consensus and set expectations about what your DAM will do and what it won’t do well. [10:12] The second thing is, as a technologist, I’m constantly trying to remind myself that technology doesn’t always have all the answers for us. Those answers are really within the organization or within workflows. [10:26] Rather than just adopting whatever new technology comes out and then trying to force that into the workflow for the users, I think it’s a much more powerful way to work when you centralize on your workflows, how people want to work and how your organization wants to be. Let that drive your technological decisions. [10:46] Then, I think those technologies can really fall into place. You make those decisions from a place of much more power. [10:54] The final thing I might share is that I really believe Digital Asset Management is a journey, not a destination, per se. There are a lot of vendors that I think will encourage this big bang idea of you buy something off the shelf, you implement it and you put all your stuff inside. Bang, your assets are managed, problem is solved. [11:16] I think the more you do things with Digital Asset Management, the more you realize that’s not the case. It’s an ongoing process. Even once you’ve got a very good system in place, over time it’s going to need to adapt to new people, to new workflows, new technologies, new ideas. A good system is going to do that for a very long time, and that’s OK .

Once I stopped looking at Digital Asset Management as a problem that could be solved and started looking at it as a process that could be managed, that really helped me, not only make some better decisions, but set some better expectations within the organization and help build systems that just made more sense.

[11:37] Once I stopped looking at Digital Asset Management as a problem that could be solved and started looking at it as a process that could be managed, that really helped me, not only make some better decisions, but set some better expectations within the organization and help build systems that just made more sense. [11:57] For people starting out or looking at this process, I think those are some things that have helped me ground my thinking.

Henrik: [12:04] Well, thanks, Dave.

Dave: [12:05] Thank you. It has been a pleasure.

Henrik: [12:06] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on Audioboom, iTunes and the Tech Podcast Network. Thanks again.

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Ben Blomfield on Digital Asset Management

Here are the questions asked:

  • How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
  • How does the largest broadcasting organization in the world use Digital Asset Management?
  • How does the organization deal with the long history of analog formats to be converted to digital form for future re-use?
  • 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 Ben Bloomfield.
Ben, how are you?
Ben Bloomfield: [0:09] Very well, thank you.
Henrik: [0:10] Ben, how were you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Ben: [0:13] My own experience in Digital Asset Management is within the world
of video. I’ve worked for a number of broadcasters around the UK and the use
of Digital Asset Management is something which is becoming increasingly
important. [0:26] Where I really started to get involved was when I was head of
content management at ITV. We were looking at what was regarded as the lensto-
lens process. That’s about the point of capturing a program, capture it digitally,
capture it straight onto disk. It would then be edited on disk. It would then
be pushed through the transmission process through to the point of actually
being transmitted as a file.
[0:50] I’ve then moved onto BBC Worldwide where I’m Director of Global
Operations and where I have a team of 40 staff based in the UK, but also have
people dotted around in other parts of the globe who facilitate the distribution
of BBC Worldwide’s content for the sales and distribution division.
[1:09] Now, we manage the distribution of around 74,000 hours of content. We
have about 1,000 customers in over 100 countries around the world. As you
can imagine, you start doing the math, it’s ensuring that the right programs we
manage some very large kind of international brands like Dr. Who, Top Gear
ensuring that those versions are the correct version for that particular area.
[1:33] They may have a foreign language version associated to them. They may
have other additional attributes. There may be photographs, metadata, as in
editorial metadata. It’s to ensure that the deals that our sales and distribution
business make…Last year, we did in the region of 260 million pounds worth of business. We’re turning a profit around 52 million. It’s a responsible job ensuring that once those deals are done, the customers can then receive their content in the given format.
Henrik: [2:07] How does the largest broadcasting organization in the world use
Digital Asset Management?
Ben: [2:12] We are wholly owned by the BBC. Our job is to distribute the BBC’s
content on a worldwide scale. We invest in the content along with BBC or
we work with our co-producers and produce the content and we bring those
assets in and we digitize them into a large sound system, which is run by Deluxe
Media. [2:36] Deluxe is a global distal asset management fulfillment organization,
and we store the store the assets within a master file format. We have a master
mezzanine format, which is at the highest quality for the standard definition or
high-definition files. We will then forward it on, given the deal.
[2:58] If we’re sending it to a broadcaster or if we’re sending it to a VOD platform,
we will then use the Digital Asset Management platform in line with a
transcode platform to then deliver the end program onto a partner.
[3:12] Those partners could be Netflix, Hulu or any number of…we have over
1,000 customers globally, of which about 160 of those customers receive files in
a digital format. Those digital formats are varying in their complexity.
[3:31] We have the DAM, which really feeds the transcoding system, which then
gives us the ability to deliver to our customers in the given file format that
they require.
[3:39] We also have a separate area where we have an internal editing facility,
where we have a storage of around 300 terabytes. We will take those programs
in from our master DAM. We may take those assets in and this is where we may
cut promos or cut promotional material or additional sales packages, which we
then use to help sell our programs internationally.
[4:06] The final piece is we have an online platform called the OLC, which is the
online catalogue for BBC Worldwide. There we have in the reason of about
5,500 to 6,000 of hours, long form programs, but they’ve been condensed
down into viewable assets over the Internet. They’re streamable assets of any
low bit rate.
[4:27] The buyers are able to watch the videos online. If they like them, they will
go forward in their sale.
[4:33] Our businesses, we have around 23,000 hours digitized in a number of
different areas. We then sell in the region of 74,000 hours of content a year
that’s licensed. Of that 74,000 hours of material, around half of it comes from a
digital source.
[4:52] We may take a digital file, turn it into another digital file, send it to our
customer. We may take a digital file and put it onto a tape and send it to the
customer. That makes about 54-55% of our business.
[5:05] The Digital Asset Management plays a huge part of how we do business
and how we keep our costs down and help drive our revenues.
Henrik: [5:13] How does the organization deal with the long history of analog
formats to be converted to digital form for future reuse?
Ben: [5:20] It’s a very interesting question. It’s certainly one that is a hot topic
for us, because we’re going through an interesting stage at the moment where
we’re transitioning away from the certain tape formats. We either choose to
digitize those assets or we lose them. That’s the bottom line. [5:37] There’s a D3
tape format, there’s a 1 inch tape format, and in some instances, 2 inch tape
formats which we’re currently going through the process of evaluating, and to
say, what are the one, there are some instances where we have to digitize them,
because if we don’t we will lose them and we will lose that content forever.
[6:00] There are some instances where there are programs which are looked on
which are saying, actually we see no commercial value in keeping this program.
There’s no historical value in keeping this, so there will be a decision to not
encode those.
[6:13] It’s really a case of, one, if it’s going on a historical figure or an historical
value to it. We are now viewing budgets so we can actually then put forward
and preserve those assets. The other side is there are programs we’re going
through and we know that we can get a commercial sale against.
[6:32] So it’s working with our internal partners to say, if we work with…there’s 2E,
which is another part of the business. If they are willing to work with us, we can
cofund restoration and preservation projects where we could then do a joint
release, or we could remaster assets which would be then used for Blu-ray, DVD
sales as well as international TV sales.
[6:55] It’s a long process, as we’ve got about 120,000 assets, tape physical
assets, in our library at the moment, and as I said those are made up of 1 inch,
2 inch, Beta SP, DigiBeta, D3, and HD. It’s a very slow turning wheel. I’m sure
in 15, 20 years’ time we’ll be thinking about how we’re going to get rid of our
HDCAM SR tapes.
[7:21] At the moment, the idea is we digitize the asset. If it needs restoration,
there is some digital restoration work that can be carried out to remove some of
the older artifacts within the material. We then store an uncompressed version
of that. It takes up a huge amount of space. For an hour program, could take
anything up to 200 gigs worth of disk space.
[7:43] We’re then looking to store those assets on a non-spinning disk. We’ll put
them on an LTO5 type system. At that point, we will also create a working mezzanine
file, a file that is regarded as broadcast quality, either standard definition
or high-definition mezzanine file format, which we could then work with. We can
then take that mezzanine file and then transcode it onto a lower bit rate or to a
specific platform’s requirements.
[8:16] The other problem we have is that within BBC Worldwide, amazing as
it may sound, we don’t actually have a single vision of the truth. We have a
vast number of assets spread across a multitude of libraries. We’ve got library
storage in LA, New York, Germany, France, the UK, Australia, Japan, and
Hong Kong.
[8:37] We have multiple foreign language versions, so that could be a program
which has an English language track on it. It could also have a foreign language
audio dub on it. It may have subtitles associated to it. It may have a slight different
variation or a different edit compared to the main master that was originally
produced in the UK.
[8:57] We’re going through, at the moment, a huge piece of work which is about
looking at our assets across the globe and evaluating those lists and producing
a single vision of the truth.
[9:09] That’s to say, this is what our product catalog looks like. Let’s say we own
a 120,000 assets. Each asset may have a number of different versions relating to
that given title. We’re having to trawl through Excel spreadsheets, Word documents,
Access databases, and really do a huge data mining exercise to evaluate
and organize all that material together.
[9:34] There’s no easy way of doing it apart from drawing in all that information
and then finding common fields within that data to then help us evaluate
whether or not we should be keeping those assets, or whether or not we’ve got
duplications.
[9:49] The first exercise is to delete the duplication, but ensure that in deleting
the duplication, it really is a duplication. There’s quite a lot of manual thumbing.
Then it’s a case of evaluating the content in a world of sales. That’s what we’re
all about.
[10:05] BBC Worldwide is about selling content internationally, but at the same
time we have a role to play in terms of maintaining the historical assets to insure
that nothing is lost.
[10:16] I mean, it’s very interesting. We’ve just been looking at some David
Attenborough material which was shot on 16mm film that was shot. I think it was
about 30 years ago, on film. But when they transferred it onto videotape, they
did it in quite a crude manner. The action, what was broadcast at the time, and
what you look at now doesn’t look great.
[10:37] But we’ve gone back to the film, and we’ve gone back and we’ve cleaned
the film up, we’ve dusted it, they call it dust busting. But it’s the removal of any
foreign artifacts, and re-transcode it, re-telecine that, or scanned it into a far
system. The quality is phenomenal.
[10:53] By going through and actually trawling these assets, we really are finding
that we’ve got some gems hidden away. We’ve known they were gems, but it’s
only when you go back to the actual master source, do you realize that it really
is fantastic quality.
[11:05] In answer to your question, I guess, the organization, to how do we actually
deal with the long issue of it, we have to understand it first. That’s something
which we’re only just starting to do. At that point, we can then prioritize
what we absolutely must keep in terms of historical, what we can lose, because
it’s duplicated, or it doesn’t have a perceived value within the business.
[11:27] It’s a case of picking the content that is of the least quality first, really,
so we know that our 2 inch and 1 inch material, it really is falling apart. It’s old
magnetic tape that we need to capture and turn into a digital file as soon as
possible, or we do run the risk of losing it. Then working through the D3 and
then the B2SP, then, eventually, we’ll be moving on to our DigiBeta, as well. But
it’s a lengthy process.
Henrik: [11:53] That’s an excellent example of how do you determine value
and what are valuable digital assets. [11:59] Lastly, what advice would you
like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM
professionals?
Ben: [12:03] People wanting to become DAM professionals, certainly within
a broadcast environment, the details around the previous questions say a lot
about what it takes to become a DAM professional. That is, attention to detail,
and the process of reviewing data from multiple sources to come up with, as I
said, this idea of a single vision of the truth. It’s the accuracy needs to be applied
when reviewing content. [12:31] It’s the methodical, patient view, analytical,
as well, to insure that where trends are taking place, where irregularities are
taking place, where mistakes are being made, they’re being picked up.
[12:46] Having a great deal of patience with Excel at the moment is a good
place to start.
Henrik: [12:51] Yes.
Ben: [12:52] It’s amazing how many broadcasts, from my previous job, working
at ITV, where I was head of content management and now moving to the BBC
here. It’s amazing. ITV is the largest commercial broadcaster in the UK. BBC
Worldwide is renowned for being the Europe’s largest distributor of broadcast
material. [13:17] I’ve come from fairly weighty backgrounds, but those businesses
are driven by Excel at the moment. They are going into a world where we’re
building systems, building new platforms. We’ve just announced at IBC this year
that we are now partnering with Sony DADC, who are Sony Pictures’ chosen
partner for distribution of content globally.
[13:40] The relationships that are being forged are based on the fact that we’re
trying to get away from an Excel business. Which is laughable, to one degree,
but brilliant for Microsoft, certainly. [laughter]
[13:50] If they knew just how, the strength of those pieces of software for us.
[13:54] But for the professional who is, certainly, there is an understanding, as I
said, about the patience and accuracy. There’s also having a peripheral technical
view on the industry that they choose. I can’t talk for any other industry, really,
other than broadcast.
[14:12] There is a base level of understanding within digital and technology that
needs to be taken on board. Then, there’s the broadcast element, can talk
about digital broadcast, talk about editing, you could talk about transcoding.
You could also get very lost in the jargon.
[14:28] Some people, that’s suits them well, in terms of, they take a given career
within their industry. But being able to cut through the jargon and explain it
on a simple level, insure that what they’re saying is understood is, I mean, I
think it speaks for a lot of industries, I’m sure. But it’s amazing how complicated
it can get.
[14:49] But actually, it doesn’t need to be that complicated. Because you’re
crossing in so many different disciplines, it does become complicated. It’s how
to see the complication, but find the simplistic way of putting that information
across to insure that your point is being made.
Henrik: [15:05] Well, thank you, Ben. [15:06] For more on Digital Asset
Management, log onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Another DAM Podcast
is available on Audioboom, Blubrry, iTunes and the Tech Podcast network.
Thanks again.

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