Listen to Chris DiNenna talk about Digital Asset Management
Transcript:
Henrik: This is Another DAM podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Chris DiNenna. Chris, how are you?
Chris: I am doing well. How are you doing?
Henrik: Great. Chris, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Chris: I came into the orbit of Digital Asset Management through my work with photographers and with stock photography agencies. I began the career about 20 years ago as a photo researcher. Kind of morphed that into photo editing. And at the time about around the recession, that was when a lot of the companies were starting to scale back and that’s when I had to find a way to reinvent myself in this industry. I think some opportunities came up that involve Digital Asset Management and it was a good move for me to go into at that time.
Henrik: Chris, how does the world’s leading river cruise line company use Digital Asset Management?
Chris: The company has been growing incredibly quickly and they decided that instead of keeping all of their assets on internal servers, they needed to bring in someone to kind of manage the whole process of all the images coming in, all the maps, all the different logos that they’ve been storing in different folders here and there. And so I was hired to come in and kind of corral all of the image assets into one big database. When I was hired, they didn’t have a DAM in place, but when I came in they acquired an Adobe product and I worked with the developers to kind of customize this database to fit the needs of the company. And so I took about 70,000 images, maps, such and kind of gave everything I kind of a standard file name so that a lot of the assets would be searchable, included a lot of metadata just so that the images would be found when someone was searching for something such as like a German castle of sort. So the company uses the DAM right now basically with a lot of their digital products, with a lot of the print materials, the content that we use online on the websites. Everything is a lot easier to find for people in the company and it’s easy for me to kind of know where the assets are living at the time.
Henrik: Chris, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Chris: Well, I think the successes I’ve had with the DAM is that it’s more manageable. It’s easier to find. We have a lot of wholly owned content that we can share out with our third parties, with our travel agents here and there. But when it gets tricky is when we have the stock photography that we licensed from different agencies and a lot of the licenses aren’t applicable to a lot of projects that we do here and there. And so instead of having a lot of these images open for anyone and everyone to use, I’m kind of the gatekeeper. And so I kind of work with people to kind of get an idea of how they’re using the images, where the image is going to end up using, the end use of course. And then, I either agree to the terms of those people to use the image or I tell them to go back in and search for another asset so that asset can be used in their final context.
Chris: The biggest challenges I’ve had though with using the Digital Asset Management is that I’m kind of a one-man show. I’ve kind of worked with a lot of different IT folks within the company over the last three years. And that’s been the toughest challenge for me is they actually have someone who is very savvy with the tech talk, with knowing the bones and the meat of the whole database and working to help me kinda work out the bugs and the challenges of kind of building out the DAM so that everyone can use this. But also to kind of make sure that the machine is running, you know, without any issues. Keep it kind of streamline. When I was hired, I think I should have made sure that there was a tech person to kind of be there to kind of work in unison with, to kind of keep this program running without any issues.
Henrik: Chris, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Chris: That’s a great question. I’ve kind of haphazardly kind of ended up in this industry just through my expertise, working with photographers and with image licensing and rights representation. If people are really set on being archivists, being librarians, of course, it’s great to get the schooling behind that since this is like a brave new world where technology is kind of leading the forefront of imagery and how images are being used in the final context, but also experience also helps. And to find a company or a mentor to kind of help you along the way is something that I think people should learn to aspire for and kind of hunt out those people out there who have the experience, who have worked with either these databases or have worked with imagery just to kind of know of the pitfalls and the and success stories that are out there so that people can learn and grow from it and be able to kind of add more wealth into the DAM business.
Henrik: Great. Well, thanks Chris.
Chris: Thank you.
Henrik: For more on this, visit anotherdampodcast.com for 200 other episodes like this and transcripts. If you have any comments or questions, send them to anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
Listen to Brad Boim discuss Digital Asset Management
Transcript:
Henrik: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Brad Boim. Brad, how are you?
Brad: I’m doing well, Henrik. How are you?
Henrik: Good. Brad, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Brad: Well, the NFL cable network launched back in 2003 with a 24/7 linear channel and at that time, we were pretty much like a startup operation, so Digital Asset Management was not really much of a part of the conversation at that point. And I was originally hired as an Avid editor and it was a pretty small operation. We had three Avids and we were working in a pretty scaled down operation from where we are today. So early on, the amount of media files that we were accessing, storing and creating was pretty minimal. And so there really wasn’t a lot of thoughts or concerns about asset management or organization at that point. And our storage was localized to individual Avids and we were running standalone islands at that point and you know, cycling… old school cycling of videotapes between local Avid Systems. So you know, sort of did that for a few years. A couple of years into the network, we scaled out from there. So we deployed a Unity system which was a 13 terabytes Unity. So finally at that point, we had some shared storage and some workspaces across our edits systems and you know 13 terabytes probably at the time seemed like a ton of storage working at DV25. But that quickly was apparent that that was not the case. We were filling the storage up in and we realized we had to kind of address it on some level, but I don’t think that we really placed a high priority on asset management at that point.
Brad: It was really a few years later when we switched our platform and storage to a SAN environment and we flipped over to Final Cut Pro and at that point, we deployed a MAM [Media Asset Management]. So that’s where we had some tools available to us to control ingesting of game content and various shows through the MAM. And that kind of led us to a place where maybe we needed to start focusing on asset management at that point. So fast forward 15 years from day one and our post operation and asset management needs have grown exponentially. So I had shifted my role from being sort of a hybrid editor and asset manager to really moving completely into the content management side of things here. And so since that point, you know years ago, I been managing all the post-production and asset management workflows here at the NFL media group in LA.
Henrik: How does the professional American football league use Digital Asset Management?
Brad: We’re a linear cable channel and we also have multiple digital platforms that we’re supporting. So our website, nfl.com and VOD channel and mobile apps and even delivery to our league sort of controlled social media sites. So you’ve got a lot of different production groups within our facility that are looking to get access to the same media assets and do it quickly. That stuff turned around as quick as possible. So it’s pretty central for us to have the ability to index and organize all these thousands of media assets within our MAM. So we put a lot of effort sort of on the front end to get as much metadata entered into the MAM on the individual assets as possible so that people can get quick access to the content. So adding a lot of metadata tags based on our internal taxonomy system, gives producers the ability to do really quicker searches in the MAM for any specific file or play or content from a specific game or an event that they’re looking to get access to. With NFL content, you can kind of categorize it into pretty distinctive categories. So it can be game footage and all the ways of describing game footage, whether it’s season or week or play description.
Brad: You have lots of things like press conferences and studio-based content for a lot of our shows that are produced out of our facility here and plenty of other categories that people typically are looking for. So within the MAM, our media asset management system. So we’re running an asset management layer across the facility. So that is indexing the thousands and thousands of media assets. So it’s essentially a search engine for curation of all the media content. You can categorize media assets and a number of ways by team or by media type, whether it’s video content, audio or still images and there are plenty of ways of sort of providing multiple metadata tags on content so that people can really find it. So in most cases, we’re tagging the same piece of media in multiple ways. So one person might do a search based on the team that are associating the search with and then another person might do a search based on a player’s name or on a season and they’re going to get to the same media assets from either of those searches.
Brad: So the system pretty flexible and intuitive for people to find things once that metadata gets added to the content. So I think our asset management system is the centralized access point for some other metadata that we’re also trying to get in that are pretty crucial to things we do on a day-to-day. So things like, and these are things that we are really sort of developing right now, but the ability to utilize cloud-based services to do things like speech-to-text on sound press conference interviews is becoming a real-valued asset for us. And once the transcripts are received back from the cloud, we’re transferring that metadata back directly into the asset management system where it becomes time aligned with the asset so people can search off of it. So for example, if you had a Bill Belichick press conference and he spoke for 15 minutes and the producer is only interested in the time that he spoke about a certain player’s injury, instead of having to listen to the entire thing, you can search off of that keyword of injury and you would be able to narrow down the specific places where that was referenced in his press conference.
Brad: And you know, in a kind of a similar way of harvesting metadata. We’re also bringing in the play by play information for every NFL game and importing that data right into the MAM [Media Asset Management] as well. So for a typical game you’ve got every single play has a play description, that information gets time aligned onto the media asset within the MAM as a marker and then all those plays with those detailed descriptions of the play becomes searchable both in the MAM, but then when the clip gets brought into the NLE [Non-Linear Editing system], the markers come with the media assets so whether you’re a logging or editing, you can search and find pretty much any play from any game. And then a few other things that we’re using tools within our MAM that become pretty useful within the building is the ability to log in, watch proxies of clips within the MAM so that PAs or producers can spend some time prepping and adding their own user-based markers onto media and adding notes into the MAM. And then that information assists the editors because all that information transfers over to the NLE when the clip is moved from the MAM into the NLE and the NLE would be our [Non-Linear] Editing platform.
Henrik: Brad, what are the biggest challenges and successes with Digital Asset Management?
Brad: I think that the volume of media that we generate within our facility on a daily basis has really increased significantly over the past few years. So it’s exceeded the support personnel capabilities that we have in our building, which are doing a lot of manual metadata tagging within the asset management system. So this kind of wave of content makes it a little bit difficult to keep up with the pace and get all that metadata applied to the assets so that everything becomes searchable within the building. So some of the things that we have been challenged with and really would like to get to is the ability to bring a real-time stats feed of the play by play from each individual football game to get that data dumped into the MAM in real time and have it time aligned with the game footage itself. And currently, we’re doing it after the fact.
Brad: So we will get that data and we’ll import it and marry it in the asset management system to the asset after the game is over. But the real value for us would be to have that data streaming in and going associating with the media clip in realtime and that’s something that we’re looking to actively solve right now. And then I think with a lot of the machine learning and AI technology that we’ve been looking at, you know, to try to automate some of the processes that we are currently doing manually. It can be a huge help. But I think some of the tools it’s been a bit slow to try to deploy some of these things. And there’s still a little bit of a level of human interaction to be able to parse through all of this machine learning metadata that you’re generating and determine how accurate it is and what data is really going to be beneficial. And what maybe is extraneous data that you want to toss out. And I think certainly as image and facial recognition technology and the speech to text and these other machine learning tools become more accessible and integrated into our asset management system we’ll be able to figure this out a little bit better and learn how to utilize. And potentially monetize it better. There’s also always been a kind of a challenge in quantifying the benefits of, you know, spending additional time and resources into metadata curation and certainly the added expense and effort of integrating machine learning data from, from end users perspectives. I think the resources are essential for them to do their day to day jobs, you know, they all want more ways to get access to content quicker and more information for them is gonna be beneficial. But translating those benefits and the expenditures on paper to reflect those immediate cost savings benefits can be kind of complicated to push that up the chain. But I think overall, we’ve leveraged our asset management tools here much more over the past few years. We’re starting to see a lot more engagement in adding these resources from our production groups here and they are the ultimate consumers of the tools that we’re providing so it’s gratifying to see them utilize these workflows that we’re building and see that we’re creating more efficiencies for them in their day to day workflows.
Henrik: Brad, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Brad: Well, I think you should always be thinking that there’s a better way to do things than maybe what you’re currently doing. Our workflows and approach to organizing content in our asset management system. It is constantly is evolving and sometimes you might come up with an idea to harvest metadata, provide it to your production teams and it just kind of falls flat or they can’t utilize it effectively and from my experience, it really helps to engage with the end users of the workflows that you’re trying to develop and listen to what they’re really trying to accomplish and sometimes a great idea…it might not fit into the aspects of live TV production and the immediacy of what they’re trying to do, but it could be a more beneficial tool for your archival workflows as opposed to the quick turnaround live approach, which doesn’t always work well when you’re trying to add extra layers for them.
Brad: So in most cases, we’re trying to develop solutions for both sides of that. You know, it really does come down to how you can directly impact the efficiencies or the people that are using the system. Like I was saying before, the emerging tools like AI and machine learning, they can potentially make our lives much better by providing richer set of data that we can all utilize, but it does create a whole new set of challenges and filtering through this mountain of data and making sure you’re using it in a way where it’s being a benefit to everybody in your buildings. So those are some of the real challenges right now. The technology that has been evolving is really keeping us fluid with some of the decisions that we’re making. I think you need to maintain a lot of flexibility with your infrastructure so that you can adapt when new technologies come into play.
Listen to Deb Fanslow discuss Digital Asset Management
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset Management (DAM). I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I was speaking with Deb Fanslow. Deb, how are you?
Deb Fanslow: Great. How are you?
Henrik de Gyor: Great. How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Deb Fanslow: I have a long career that got me where I am today. Currently, I’m in a role that seems to be following the trend in the industry. I’m working in Digital Asset Management, but also in a broader content management role which really looks at the end-to-end flow of content, more the digital supply chain type of analogy. What I focus on right now is a lot of not just getting content in the DAM and tagged, but content re-use of various types of assets not just your traditional marketing, but also a lot of communications. In my case, I work in the pharma industry so a lot of medical content which is really interesting to look out. I work with a lot of automation initiatives, workflow initiatives, looking a lot of metrics to see how content being reused, how we can optimize our system to increase that and increasingly a few of my more recent roles have been involved with modular content which are just starting to hear more about in the field. It seems to be inevitable when you’re talking about multichannel marketing campaigns that you really need to modularize your content instead of creating it from scratch and recreating it for 50 different channels. So it’s different types of content, different types of ecosystems, but it keeps me busy.
Deb Fanslow: My background actually I started as a graphic designer so I came into the field from the user standpoint I’d say as basically somebody who saw all the pain points working as a creative and got into being interested in managing the content and how we get it together. And I decided to move and to become a librarian and found my inner nerd and became a school library media specialist which I always tell people is one of the best training you can how to become a digital asset manager. Cause you’re dealing with people how they interface with your systems how they search their pain points. And it really gave me a good grounding and user experience. And for librarians, it’s really all about the user. So for me, that was wonderful. I worked my way through various industries because I actually wasn’t easy to get into DAM. I mean I worked in libraries, museums, archives, education field and really wanted to move over to the private sector. So I worked in e-commerce first a little bit. And now I pretty much have landed in Pharma which is great in New Jersey. But I I like to bring in that content that experience from other industries to really inform my current role.
Henrik de Gyor: What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?
Deb Fanslow: Well, how much time you have? You know, it’s interesting. I do keep tabs on the industry and what consultants are writing out there, what vendors are writing and practitioners and despite the volume of content on not just implementations but DAM programs. There’s still an awful lot to put in technology first. Instead of figuring out your workflows and your process and then choosing a tool to enhance that and on the other side been in situations where there is technology not fit for purpose that people are you trying to use a system that has some sort of repository and are trying to use that as a dam. And I would say on the people’s side staffing, staffing, staffing. I’ve been in situations as well where you know they expect this the child to do everything and they don’t have the people behind it not just to administrate the system which has become more of a focus lately.
Deb Fanslow: But you really really need somebody in that QC (quality control) role because your data is everything. And I believe there was a recent Henry Stewart conference where somebody mentioned something that really stuck to me and it was you can integrate your systems all you want but if that data is not good that you’re sending along then there’s no point. So my feeling is process and the actual information architecture that’s something that you can always work on and progressively improve. But if you don’t have the people and the right tool then you’re in trouble. So I’d say for challenges that’s been my personal experience. On the bright side, some of the successes I’ve seen again are looking at the industry and I think that the vendors and the organizations finally realizing that DAM is not just a repository. It’s part of your supply chain and it needs to be integrated.
Deb Fanslow: And one of the things that I really like is yes at least in the private sector print departments but it really gained steam in marketing which is great because they had to the heavy pockets. But I’m just starting to hear a peeps about DAM become an centralized service which is where I think it’s going to be most successful and strong organizations where that has been the case I have seen more success not just in managing the content but the rights around it and then working with cross-functional teams to really manage the end to end content management flow, not just rich media.
Henrik de Gyor: Deb, you started the DAM directory. Tell us more about this resource.
Deb Fanslow: I actually had to look up some stats. I didn’t realize myself that I started it way back in 2014 which sounds like a long time ago. I have seven guides published right now and what people don’t see is there’s 14 more in the back end that I’ve been working on for some time that might debut this year or next. It does take a long time to put context around the links but essentially what the DAM directory is it’s basically a compilation of the massive amounts of resources I collected through when I was getting my MLIS degree which is a Master’s in library and information science. So when I get overwhelmed I like to curate only what I need and get rid of the rest and put it somewhere that I can access. So it started out really as a professional resource for myself and figured you know what I need something in the cloud that makes sense to me is easy to find things and I can use it at any job because I’m a big fan of offloading information so I don’t have to try to memorize all. And. It occurred to me that social bookmarking sites were not going to cut it. I’m a librarian so I do like hierarchy. So I was a fan more of this directory site as I had seen it used for reference guides and academic libraries and I decided to approach the vendor and ask them if I could use it for a project that would help them advertise their platform. And wouldn’t you know the DAM directory was born. So we average about 550 views a month for all the guides combined.
Deb Fanslow: And even just looking at last year we had over 7,000 views total so I’d say it’s been a success. And one of the things I tried to do with that is to get others in the industry involved because A) I don’t know everything B) there’s just so much information out there and everyone has different strengths. The problem is we all have day jobs as well. So so far it’s pretty much just me. But one of the really interesting things like Yeah it’s out there you can go look and it’s you know you do keep it up to date the best that I can. But people can go in there and really get a sense of the industry and how it’s changing like I see blogs come and go as the conferences come and go different books are being published. I mean it’s really a great place to get a page the pulse of the industry as well.
Deb Fanslow: From my memory which I’ve already established is not that great. We have a basic guide on what I call corporate DAM which is really the private sector which I struggled with for a while because I mean DAM is DAM across all industries. But there really are different conferences and different books and different frameworks that people within different industries develop. So this one receives the most traffic. I’ve got others just specifically on topics like metadata. I have one coming up on taxonomy. I’ve got one on DAM vendors which is very popular and DAM education which is very overwhelming that one is still constantly throwing things in there. And I believe there is one coming. It’s not there already on basic tools and processes that you might use in adjunct with your DAM system for data crunching and all sorts of things. But there’s a variety of stuff on there and I do take requests if there’s something that people are interested in they want to send me some resources then I’m always open for that. You can reach that at damdirectory.libguides.com
Henrik de Gyor: Deb, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?
Deb Fanslow: You know what. This is a great question and I’m actually very passionate about helping people find what they want to do in their life and mentoring people and just bringing awareness and advocacy for the field because it really presents a great opportunity for folks who have creative backgrounds or marketing backgrounds to leverage that experience in Digital Asset Management where it is critical for you to understand how content is created and how it’s marketed, how it moves through various workflows and even how it’s distributed. So. I’ve typically found people who are most successful in DAM have multiple backgrounds. I mean yes you can go to library school or you know you can be a graphic designer, photographer, but you typically need to combine you know I.T. skills with content skills and people skills. So for me I mean there’s so many different ways to get into that field speaking out to folks who want to enter.
Deb Fanslow: My advice is always for people who contact me is something similar to a consultant told me five years ago is to start by managing your own collection and get experience anywhere you can. I would say if you have the means volunteer, find a mentor, attend meetups. One of the resources that isn’t quite as broadly promoted is a Google Group called DAM Peeps and it’s actually listed in the directory. But if you look it up on Google, it’s a site that is tailored for DAM administrators and consultants. Sorry vendors, we do limit it to non-commercial members but it’s I’m actually really proud of that because it’s a place where even solo administrators especially can go out and say “Hey, is anyone dealing with this or how do we deal with this? Do you have any advice on this topic?” and it’s become a very active group. Right now we have a little over 30 members, but I’m hoping that others can join because a lot of information professionals and DAM administrators they work alone and people might not always understand what they do and there’s not always a source of wisdom for all the little intricacies of the job. So I take my last year of advice for the people looking to get an is to tailor, tailor, tailor your past experience or the type of job you’re looking for. So research the job listings out there. Don’t just blindly submit your resume that you’ve been using for the last 10 years in a different industry that is not going to work. So for the folks who are in the industry, just don’t stop learning. I mean really there is so much to learn. You really just can’t afford to sit around and do the same thing you are doing today and tomorrow.
Henrik de Gyor: Great. Well thanks, Deb. For more on this, visit AnotherDAMpodcast.com. If you have any comments or questions, please send them to anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.
