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Another DAM Podcast interview with Karl Jackson on Digital Asset Management

Karl Jackson 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 Karl Jackson.

Karl, how are you?

Karl Jackson:  [0:10] I’m really well. Thank you.

Henrik:  [0:12] Karl, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Karl:  [0:15] Since 1995, I’ve been the audio and video production lead for “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band here in Washington, DC. What the band does is it provides musical support to the White House, to the President of the United States and to the Commandant of the Marine Corps.

[0:32] In that capacity, we perform all manner of ceremonies in and around the Washington, DC area. In addition, we have a very active public concert schedule. We typically will play at least one public performance every week. As you can imagine, we have quite an archive of wonderful audio and video recordings.

[0:52] We’ve been in existence since 1798, and we’ve been making audio recordings at least since the late 1880s. When I took over the Marine Band as the audio and video production lead, one of my primary responsibilities was to be the steward, really, of all of those audio recordings and video recordings.

[1:13] That’s how I got involved with Digital Asset Management, was first taking care of all of those analog recordings, but then increasingly digitizing those recordings and dealing with born digital recordings. Making all of those recordings available to our musicians, our musical directors and increasingly to the general public.

Henrik:  [1:33] Karl, why does a military band use Digital Asset Management?

Karl:  [1:37] It was really the late 1990s when it became clear to us that we needed to have a process for dealing with an increasing quantity of digital files. These initially were digital audio files that resided on all manner of media, from Betamax tapes to Digital Audio Tapes to compact discs.

[1:59] We had all of this media that we wanted to have ready access to. We started thinking about how could we do that, and realized that our first task was to decide what was important and to catalog that in a way that was useful to us, and then to make that all available to our musicians and directors.

[2:20] We have quite a lot of historical recordings, and all of those recordings are actively used by our video editors and by our audio editors in order to create products for historical projects and for public performances, and increasingly for web products, both on our own websites as well as YouTube websites and things like that.

[2:42] Our musical directors use the DAM quite a bit for research purposes. They need to have very quick and ready access to previous concert recordings in order to put together future events, not only at the White House but also for our public performances.

[2:58] For example, the musical director may get a call from the White House tasking us with a performance for a specific diplomat that’s going to be visiting, and the social event might have some very specific requirements. The musical director needs to be able to tap into an archive of historical and current recordings to put together that program appropriately. Our musical directors use it quite a lot.

[3:23] Our musicians are using it quite a lot as well for research purposes. For a lot of our public performances, the musicians will use search tools to find performances that have been done in the past of pieces they want to do in the future, both in order to learn how they have been performed historically, but also to get ideas for how they might make those performances their own.

[3:48] We use the DAM system and processes across the organization.

Henrik:  [3:53] What are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Karl:  [3:58] Initially, the first challenges that we faced were designing a system that fit who we were. What we wanted to be able to do was have a system that provided all of the information that we needed, but that wasn’t so cumbersome that it didn’t get used.

[4:13] That challenge we met by first talking deeply about who we are and how we work, and finding ways to describe our workflow and our organization using the tools of databases, schema, and finding ways to link. For example, some of our sheet music assets with some of our performances, and find ways to link those to audio recordings, so that we were able to build a web of data that’s really useful and usable rather than just having a bunch of miscellaneous metadata that might not at the end of the day be usable.

[4:56] That was the first challenge. We faced it very successfully by talking deeply about who we were, like I said. Another challenge that we’ve faced over the years as technology has progressed is finding a way to make all of that information available to our musicians in a way that they can easily use.

[5:17] Sometimes information can be overwhelming, and especially information in the kinds of quantities that we are collecting. But we needed a user experience that made it quite easy for anyone who used our systems to find what they needed in a really expeditious way.

[5:34] We did that by, again, just talking carefully with those audiences, building some use cases and figuring out what they really needed. In some cases, we were able to provide that. In other cases, we found alternative ways to find those solutions. User experience was a key aspect to getting a successful DAM system in place for us.

[5:58] Another challenge that we faced, and this is probably one that many, many DAM managers in government face, is the challenges that are implicit with implementing information systems projects around the government. There is sometimes very costly and time‑intensive systems to implement. That can be a challenge.

[6:20] The most successful way to face that challenge is through patience and perseverance. In my case, I did quite a lot of research into what the requirements were for government information systems, and I was able to figure out ways to get the job done in a way that wasn’t maybe as onerous as it could have been.

[6:38] Those are some of the challenges. We’ve been able to face those pretty successfully. We’ve got a great team, and so we’ve got a project that works quite well.

Henrik:  [6:47] What advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Karl:  [6:52] I’ll follow along with the team theme. Building a great team to implement a DAM is really, really key, because Digital Asset Management solutions by their very nature have a lot of different aspects to them. You have all of the specific subject matter, expertise that the content creators will have. You have specific subject matter expertise coming from the information systems side. You have expertise coming from the organizational and workflow side.

[7:24] You have to come at it from the perspective of building a great team first. I think that the processes and systems, and workflows will all come out of that. You have to start with the organization and the team, and the people that are involved first. That’s probably the thing that I’ve tried to keep people on is focus less on the technology, and more on the people that are using the technology.

[7:53] There are many, many DAM systems out there. Some are appropriate for some organizations more so than others. But at the end of the day, you need to find a system that works for your people and a set of processes that works for how they want to be working.

[8:07] Beyond that, for people who want to be involved in DAM, is just to start doing it. DAM is something that sounds very, possibly, official, and maybe even imposing, but it’s really something that all of us do all of the time.

[8:23] To be involved in DAM means just doing it increasingly well. If you manage an iTunes system for your home computer, that’s really doing DAM. If you’re interested in DAM, dig into ways of doing that even better.

[8:38] If you’re really interested, it’s crucial to get involved in the community. There are so many smart people, like yourself, out there doing DAM, and it’s crucial to be listening to what they’re saying and following what they’re talking about. Discovering new ideas and trying to bridge the gaps between areas of interest within DAM so that we can all keep getting better at it.

Henrik:  [9:02] Great point on making it people, process, technology, in that order. That’s a good point, to keep users on the forefront, that DAM is first of all about people. Thanks, Karl.

Karl:  [9:12] This has been fun. I love talking about this stuff. I sometimes feel like, coming at it from a content side, I don’t necessarily have all of the bells and whistles figured out. But I feel like some of this stuff is really important for organization, so I really enjoy it.

[9:26] I’ve got to say, I really have enjoyed your podcast.

Henrik:  [9:28] Thank you.

Karl:  [9:29] The folks you’re pulling in, it’s really neat to hear about some of the things that they’re doing. You had a gentleman on recently talking about his experiences with “Sesame Street.” That was pretty cool to hear some of the challenges that they faced. Thanks for doing that. That’s really neat.

Henrik:  [9:43] You’re welcome. Thanks again. I appreciate it, from yourself and anyone who contributes to this podcast series. There will be plenty more.

Karl:  [9:49] Great. I look forward to them.

Henrik: [9:51] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to anotherdamblog.com. Another DAM Podcast is available on AudioBoom and iTunes.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

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Another DAM Podcast interview with Rob Schuman on Digital Asset Management

Rob Schuman 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 Rob Schuman.
Rob, how are you?

Rob Schuman: [0:10] Great.

Henrik: [0:11] Rob, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management?

Rob: [0:14] Well, I got involved about 12 years ago, which was early for Digital Asset Management. Right now, I’m a general consultant. I help people organize, choose vendors, and help them implement the big change management that comes along with any DAM system. Also, advise people on technical issues of how to set up a DAM system that works well for everyone.

[0:39] Back when I was at Sesame Workshop, which was then called Children’s Television Workshop, the Sesame Street producers asked me if there was any way they could view their library without having to go up to the library and pull cassettes and cue up cassettes and all of that. The executive producers had a problem that they were reusing the same clips over and over and over again because those were the ones that people knew in their heads, while clips that were just as good were sitting in the library idle because no one wanted to take the time to go and find them.

[1:13] We said we’d do what we could, and about a year later, we developed one of the first DAM systems for video and television. It was very early in the DAM marketplace, and we believed it was the first or one of the first video Digital Asset Management systems. It was completely homegrown. We had any number of metadata fields and attached them to both proxy video and broadcast-quality video.

[1:41] We also were one of the first to include DAM as part of their workflow. It made producing the show so much easier, got them to do segments, have the segments approved by the producer, then get them right down into the edit room to complete them. I worked for Merck, the drug manufacturing company, and right now, I’m at the New York City Ballet. I call myself “content agnostic” because ultimately every company has their content professionals.

[2:11] They don’t need me to produce content for them. They need me to organize that content and make sure everybody has access to it and make sure that their workflows are automated. They don’t really need another person on content. Really, assets are assets, whether they’re talking about drugs, dance, or Sesame Street. I laugh that I worked for Sesame Street and Dow Jones, and the work is basically the same.

Henrik: [2:45] Organizing information?

Rob: [2:46] Yup, and making sure they can find it.

Henrik: [2:49] Yeah, very key. How does an organization focused on ballet use Digital Asset Management?

Rob: [2:56] Unlike music where there’s a score, dance is really a visual medium. Back in the mid 1980s, somebody had the idea of taking a VHS camcorder and sticking it up on the front of the balcony and taping the ballets. That stayed on VHS for a very long time, updated a little bit when camcorders became digital. They have a library of about 2, 500 or more performances.

[3:26] They have some rehearsals. It’s all on VHS tape. They got a grant from a government group called “Saving America’s Treasures” to try to rescue these. The New York City Ballet has this school so that the students could study choreographers like Balanchine or Jerome Robbins. What they’ve done is built their own Digital Asset Management in just stations.

[3:53] Right now, the theater has been redone with high-definition control room and high-definition cameras. All of the ballets or most of them are recorded as files, which we then add a whole lot of metadata to and put into their asset management system for anyone to find. You can look by choreographer by, of course, the date, and the musical piece.

[4:20] You can look at, “Let’s see all the variations of ‘The Nutcracker'” or “Let’s compare this choreographer’s version to that choreographer’s version.” They’re just starting to get to the launch of this. They want to put a computer and monitor in every dance studio that they’ve got. They have, I think, nine of them, including the ones from the school, so that they can work with the students and show them exactly how it’s done. Video is the only way to capture a live performance, and that’s what they do.

Henrik: [4:50] That’s great. Rob, what are the biggest challenges and successes you’ve seen with Digital Asset Management?

Rob: [4:57] The biggest challenge is the one that almost everybody faces. People think it’s choosing a DAM system or the technology you use or the metadata schema that you use, but really, it’s making sure that your customers are happy that there’s an acceptance of workflow changes. I’ve worked at places with both.

[5:18] At Sesame Street, we never really launched the DAM system, because by the time it came for the date to launch it, everybody had it. People saw it in beta and said, “I need this. I don’t care that it’s not ready. I don’t care, I’ll report bugs, but I want to use this.” That was a big success.

[5:37] At a big company like Merck, management came down and said, “We’re going to use this Digital Asset Management system,” and there was so much resistance. People were just tossing assets in there. There was a lot of metadata management that had to go followed up and a lot of wasted time, effort and energy that if you start with getting the folks enthusiastic, and if you get as close to their current workflows as possible and come in with the attitude that this is not something that management is demanding.

[6:12] This is something that will make your work easier and make you more productive. One example of that, again going back to Sesame Street, one day a woman came into my office in tears because she realized that the DAM system would be down over the weekend for some maintenance. She needed to get something done by Monday or her boss was going to be very angry with her, and she was just so afraid of that.

[6:39] I told her I would talk to her boss and smooth things out, but we still needed to maintain the system. But later, it occurred to me that that’s exactly how a successful DAM should be working. You should be upset if you can’t use it or if the system goes down, because it’s so critical to your work.

[6:58] Some more successfully than others tried to get across that being enthusiastic about the DAM and getting people on your side early in the game is the most important thing. The usual challenge, which is getting people on board and making sure that everything works, technology is changing so rapidly. One of the biggest challenges in DAM right now is the user interfaces.

[7:28] A lot of the systems that I’ve seen are really great on the back end, but forget that there are people on the front end who really need to be coaxed along, just throwing up a series of fields for them to fill in this form. It doesn’t help unless there’s a counteraction of, well, instead of having to write this on paper, or I can find stuff later if I put metadata on it now. Of course, there’s always the ‘metadata policeman’ who has to go in and look at everything going into the system.

Henrik: [8:01] We’re all familiar with those [laughs] , since we do those tasks regularly or we have in the past.

Rob: [8:08] One thing I did at Merck was I put a sign on my cubicle there that said, I thought “DAM” was too violent a word, even though we all like using it. I said this was “Marketing Operations Management,” and I thought “MOM”. Let’s call it the “MOM” system.

Henrik: [8:28] Rob, what advice would you like to share with DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM professionals?

Rob: [8:33] Basically, the only real advice I can give is to go for it. It’s a young and growing area of computer and personal information and marketing information. I’d say study what you can. Ask questions. Learn about metadata. Learn from others. Go to the DAM meet-up to meet people and find out what they’re doing. Then, if you can, get the exposure to a DAM system.

[9:04] You don’t really need to go back to school for a full library degree to understand basic metadata. There’s a need for entry-level people to actually be the ‘metadata policemen’ and enter things into the DAM system. Generally, the person who is in charge of it doesn’t really have the time, particularly for the large systems, to go over what’s going in, to be the ‘metadata police’, so to speak, and make sure that the DAM system is loaded with all of the proper information.

[9:35] I used to advise television people, “Just go and get the exposure to it and show that you’re interested. Volunteer to do some stuff. Sure enough, when they need somebody, they’re going to turn to you, or somebody else is going to need somebody, they’re going to turn to you and get you started at a career.”

Henrik: [9:54] Well, thanks Rob.

Rob: [9:55] Rob: You’re welcome.

Henrik: [9:56] For more on this and other Digital Asset Management topics, go to anotherdamblog.com. Another DAM Podcast.com is available on AudioBoom and iTunes.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at anotherdamblog@gmail.com. Thanks again.

Listen to Another DAM Podcast on Apple Podcasts, AudioBoom, CastBox, Google Podcasts,  RadioPublic, RSS, Spotify or TuneIn

Need Digital Asset Management advice and assistance?

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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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