How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does an information management and consulting company help a major news organization with DAM?
What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today I’m speaking with Philip Spiegel. Philip,
how are you? Philip Spiegel: Good, Henrik. How are you? Henrik: Good. Philip, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management? Philip: I’ve come out of the stock footage and film archive world, and have
been doing Digital Asset Management before it even had that cool title. We
used to call it getting our house in order and being as smart about our assets
as possible. As this world has evolved to be more robust and more ingrained in
other businesses, it’s grown around me and taken off in lots of ways. Most recently,
I’ve been involved in media archives and their relationship to DAMS, previously
at Getty Images, as well as National Geographic in getting their archive
in order, and getting the house in order to be able to officially get things into
the DAM system so it can be retrieved and used and repurposed and re-content
monetized as need be. Henrik: How does information management and consulting company help in a
major new organization with DAM? Philip: Well, I think that the funny thing about with Net Now is we get to really
apply our specialty environment that is brilliant at what they do but not necessarily
focused on the Albert Fritz type projects like archive management and
DAM management and being really masters of their fate. It is not their core
competency. It’s our core competency. It’s a great opportunity for us to bring
in our specialty and offer a great service to free up the energies to focus on
what they do best. It makes a lot of sense. It’s really an exciting opportunity for
both of us.
We’re embedded here, and really it’s seamless and transparent. If you didn’t
know, other than the back-end being slightly different, it’s really irrelevant. But
behind the scenes at the management level, they’ll be able to really apply good
best practices and get into the weeds far deeper than could have happened
before because frankly, again, it wasn’t their core competency. Henrik: What advice would you give DAM professionals or people aspiring to
become a DAM professional? Philip: I think there’s two different sets of advice I would give DAM professionals
that are already in the business and already working on projects. I
always lean towards being technology agnostic. Not preconceiving an idea of
how a particular device or product may make your life easier but instead really
make more organically from the, what am I trying to achieve? What is my core
business need?
Who are my key clients and users, and how do they interact with the system
they have now? How would they reinteract with the system going forward? Then
build the plan around that. Then find the technology that makes the most sense
on those particular requirements once they are identified.
It’s really easy for all of us to be geeky, like kids in a candy store, and get real
excited about the different gadgets but we have to fight the temptation, and remember
that we are all trying to solve a basic work flow process questions and
problems. We can’t lose sight of that.
That’s a huge one that I advocate on. I’ve spoken before about how technology
can be our savior, it’s not the only thing that makes things different.
There have been plenty of instances where I’ve been in new environments
where money spent on technology solution could have easily gone toward
something not necessarily technology driven, and we would have gotten just as
good, if not the same, result. It’s really important not to pick out the car before
you really know how to drive.
People who are aspiring to be in this profession, I think that it’s important to
really get your hands dirty. I’m a big fan of experience, on the job training.
Recently, I was excited to attend a conference here in New York.
There were so many people there from programs either at Columbia or at Pratt.
They’re getting better, there was an opportunity for them to be exposed where
I think when I was younger and that age, it was more just organic.
Again, it didn’t really have this formal umbrella industry around it. But again, I
think it’s important to just get your hands dirty, and really just to intern or volunteer
or work part time but try to get into a real world situation.
It’s going to be the most valuable experience. It’s great to have theory. It’s great
to be able to talk to others and to participate in different events, but until you
really are thrown into the deep end of the pool, you may not have as much as
you could otherwise. Henrik: It does make sense. Thanks Philip. Philip: Thank you, Henrik. Good to talk to you. Henrik: You too. For more on Digital Asset Management log on to AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
Why does a community church group use Digital Asset Management?
What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and people aspiring to become DAM Professionals?
Transcript:
Henrik de Gyor: [0:02] This is Another DAM Podcast about Digital Asset
Management. I’m Henrik de Gyor. Today, I’m speaking with Jim Sippel.
Jim [0:09] how are you? Jim Sippel: [0:10] I’m good, how are you? Henrik: [0:12] Good. Jim, how are you involved with Digital Asset Management? Jim: [0:16] The way I got involved with Digital Asset Management, I currently
work at Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago land area. We’re a very
large church, we’re one of the largest churches in the country. My role here is
managing and directing the post production and field production in video. I
don’t do the live production of video or for services, I actually am in the content
creation side. [0:44] When Digital Asset Management came to Willow Creek
about four years ago, it was through our IT department that was trying to resolve
a problem that they were having with a lot of people using, and you may
have talked about this on previous shows, having their own desktop DAMs.
Meaning that everybody was storing content that they were creating on their
own laptops, their own desktops, their own server folders.
[1:11] Our IT department realized that they were having a problem of they were
running out of space, they were having to purchase more server spaces, drives,
and maintenance and all that goes along with that cost.
[1:20] When they did their own internal audit, they realized that video was probably
the biggest culprit in absorbing all that storage and space. They approached
us, saying, “We’re going to purchase a Digital Asset Management system, and
it’s going to solve all your problems.
[1:37] Start putting everything on there and don’t put it on the network at all
because you’re killing us. Every time you transfer a video you slow down the
network, and storage, and so on and so forth.”
[1:48] We’re all like, “OK, what’s a DAM and why do we have to use this?” “Why?
Because we like this.”
[1:54] After the first year and a half of implementation, and I use that term
loosely because it was implemented, but nobody was using it. Out of frustration,
they came to me and said, “Jim, you seem to be a little more knowledgeable
than most on what Digital Asset Management is. Your department is the
one who’s using the most amount of IT services, so guess what. You’re going to
manage this and good luck with that.”
[2:24] With very little training or any kind of orientation, I wound up having to
be the guy to learn how to do Digital Asset Management. We’ve thrown this
around before. I became an accidental DAM manager because I had no previous
experience. It’s been quite a learning curve. [laughs]
[2:43] Getting involved with it is, first and foremost, I had to understand what our
business was at doing video and doing video within a church. Then, as it expanded
out I had to learn what other ministries were doing with media in general,
and how they were using it within the church.
[3:02] Just like any other business, our realization is we’re using a lot of digital
media. That all needs to get managed, especially when you’re trying to locate
things, whether it’s pictures, video images, stock images, music.
[3:20] A lot of people never, really had to think about, “How am I storing this,
and how do I find it, and how do others find it?” This is how I got involved
with it. It’s not that I was looking for it. It’s just kind of like I didn’t sit down
fast enough.
[laughter] Henrik: [3:38] Why does a community church group use Digital Asset
Management? Jim: [3:42] Again, just like other businesses, we have a lot of media content.
We produce hundreds of hours of video. We have hundreds, if not thousands,
of hours of live church services across over 50 ministries throughout our organization.
[4:01] Not all ministries have a live service, but they’ll request or create
content that’s either going to go into a teaching class, or they’ll use it on the
Internet or they will use it in the service itself. All of these, as with the rest of
society, we become more and more media savvy, more digital savvy. In creating
that content, it all needs to go someplace, obviously.
[4:29] When you look at the history of the church, they’ve been managing
content for thousands of years. From “Dead Sea Scrolls” to printing Bibles in
a Gutenberg press and trying to distribute that. It’s a natural phase for the
church to go from analog and physical asset management to Digital Asset
Management.
[4:53] Our asset is the message that we have in the church. That’s number one.
Then everything we create around it to support preaching that message naturally
fits. We need to store that and be smart about it and steward our resources
and our money well by being able to retrieve that information. Be able to make
it usable for other people.
[5:15] We may create a great video for a service and then one of our youth
ministries want to use it, but they don’t want to use all of it because they want
to create it for their age group. They may want to change some components
within that video like, maybe, they want to take the music out that we use and
put some better music in from their perspective. That’s an asset that needs to
go into that piece of content. Or they want to use graphics and, maybe, the
graphics for the old people church is not cool enough for their service. They can
create their own graphics and insert that into the core of that content.
[5:47] It’s, really, great to be able to have that ability to be able to go into a
centralized system, find those different assets that you can use to either make
a derivative of the original piece and make it work for your specific ministry or
business group. Then be able to take those assets that you create within your
own group and put that in a centralized location that other people can grab it
and use it for theirs.
[6:15] It also helps through all continuity throughout the different medias, too. If
we’re using something live in the service and then we decide we want to put it
up on the Internet or we want to use it in other distributions through publishing
or whatever, it’s like everybody can go to that one place and grab that specific
asset that’s important to that brand or whatever they’re trying to do. And be
able to incorporate that into the piece so that there’s continuity throughout the
different media that it may be in. Henrik: [6:43] Jim, what advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Jim: [6:47] Well, for those that are in the predicament that I was in where it’s
you’re chosen to be the DAM manager, I think one of the things that the learning
that I’ve come away with is understanding it forces you to sit down and think
about what do you do just within your own group. What do you do? Why are
you doing it and what are you trying to do with it? [7:09] For me, it was a very
interesting exercise to go through to think about this is where we start, this is
where we end and here’s everything that’s involved in that process. Now, some
organizations are, probably, more thoughtful than we’ve been, but it really
helped identify a lot of things in terms of what happens to our videos. What are
all the elements that are going into that video? Then, what happens to the video
afterwards, and who needs it? What do they want to do with it?
[7:38] Going through that alone, really, helps to identify, I think, what you need in
a Digital Asset Management system. What are the different components do you
need? Do you need it to do a lot of different transcoding within itself or do you
have to buy an add-on or a bolt-on? Do you need a document management to
go along with that and how does it tie back to your specific digital assets?
[8:08] All these things I never thought about when I was creating video. We
would think about what’s our script, how are we shooting it and it goes into the
tape library until somebody asks for a copy. That’s how I’ve thought about it
most of the time. And obviously, did it succeed in the message?
[8:25] The next thing I learned through all this, is I had to build…Well it was twofold.
I had to be a salesman through this whole thing to get people to buy into
why would they want to take their work and put it into this centralized storage
system or repository? Instead of keeping it on their desktop where they can go
into their my docs and pull it up, or they can go into their thumb drives or external
hard drives and pull up that content or asset, immediately, and be able
to use it.
[8:55] Trying to cast that vision for…Well, you could add more value. The whole
point of an asset is to add value to it. The more you make it accessible to others
for use, the more value it creates. It’s like what Kevin Kelly talked about in one
of his books from “Wired” where the fax machine by itself has no value, but the
more fax machines there are in the world the more value there is. Obviously,
that dates us [laughs] because people, probably, don’t use fax. The same with
an asset if you think about that.
[9:30] With the sales, there also has to be trust. Again, if they’re able to look at a
tape on their shelf or look at a hard drive on their shelf, there’s the feeling like,
“OK . I have control over this and I know where it is.”
[9:43] Where it goes into a central repository it’s like you don’t see it. If people
are going to put it in there, they want to be able to get it back out like they do
with their desktop DAM. Because they can’t see that asset and they’re putting it
in that repository, they got to have that trust that they can find it quickly.
[10:00] Most people will browse. They want to click through however your repository
interface is set up, whether it’s a folder collection or it’s little widgets. But
they can get to it quickly just browsing.
[10:12] Or if you have the metadata, which is like learning about, what is metadata?
What is taxonomy? How do I? But if it’s offered search purposes that they
can put in keywords and be able to find again what they’re looking for quickly,
and have confidence that it’s there. Or they have confidence that whatever their
search, whatever search they create, it’s going to return to them quality assets.
[10:36] Because, again, you can use really broad strokes on metadata and you
can return 100 assets on a search that, really, are not relevant to what you’re
looking for. Or you can design metadata that, or descriptions of that asset, in
a way that’s going to return 10 to 20 high quality assets where it’s right there
on the first page. You don’t have to go through 20 pages to find what you’re
looking for.
[11:00] Just learning how to do that. What’s metadata? What makes quality
metadata? What’s taxonomy? How am I structuring all of this stuff? This is all
stuff I wish I would have known when this was put on me. Fortunately, through
this community and yourself, a lot of people out there that were blazing a trail
before me are very helpful in learning that structure.
[11:23] I think, the third component is learning, networking with others. You
realize, hey, I’m not the only one [laughs] that’s tried to figure this out. There’s
others, and just learning from each other. That’s been a huge help to me is like
being a part of various digital asset conferences, whether it’s LinkedIn groups,
or Another DAM Podcast or Another DAM Blog and other resources that are
out there.
[11:48] It’s great to be able to know you can go to…You meet people, and you
learn where this all is and you don’t have to build this all by yourself. Yeah,
networking is the third and, really, important component, too. There’s a whole
bunch of other things, but those are probably my top three.
[12:05] As far as aspiring, don’t know if I have too much advice [laughs] for aspiring
other than the same thing. Henrik: [12:10] Great. Well, thanks, Jim. Jim: [12:12] You’re welcome. Henrik: [12:14] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.
How are you involved with Digital Asset Management?
How does a media company use a DAM?
What advice would you like to give to 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 Clayton Dutton.
Clayton, how are you? Clayton Dutton: [0:10] I’m fine today, thank you for having me on the show. Henrik: [0:12] You’re welcome. Clayton, how are you involved with Digital
Asset Management? Clayton: [0:16] Well, at Discovery Channel we have moved over the past few
years into almost a purely file based working environment. We still have a few
processes to migrate into file based workflows, but as such, we’ve really migrated
our entire way of doing business from a physical asset methodology
more to file based methodology. [0:36] Specifically dealing with the incoming
deliverables, file based receipt of material, both camera masters and program
originals in a file based manner, as well as sending those files out of our facility. Henrik: [0:51] Great. How does a media company such as yours use the DAM? Clayton: [0:55] Well, for us it’s about knowing where our content is and being
able to expose it to as many people, and as wide an area, as we possibly can.
That obviously requires a lot of moving pieces, specifically bandwidth, that you
get files in and out of a facility. That bandwidth’s not going to do you any good
if you don’t know what you have, and where it is, and how to expose it. [1:17]
Digital Asset Management and Discovery’s viewpoint is really about that. It’s
about making sure we know where everything is, what it’s named, as much information
as we can find about it through the metadata, and provide that information,
and push that information out to the user community so that they have to
mine for information, to try to expose as much as we can to them.
[1:40] That allows us then to be in really good communication, and collaborate in
a much larger than the isolated workflows of the past. Henrik: [1:51] What advice would you like to give to DAM professionals and
people aspiring to become DAM professionals? Clayton: [1:56] Those of you looking to get into the Digital Asset Management
field, I’d say you’re…Congratulations. You are definitely future-proofing yourself.
Digital Asset Management is exploding right now, not in just television, but in
all businesses throughout the world. [2:12] Knowledge and information is power,
so to have that information, to understand as much as you can about specific
assets, whether it’s secret intelligence, or video files, or audio files, or tax records,
it’s extremely important.
[2:30] As information becomes more digital, as an entire way of doing business,
it’s really important that people are able to find information, key information,
about their job and about their company’s products as quickly as possible.
[2:44] The traditional lines of library storage and cataloging and things like that
are all being turned upside down. Adding fresh young minds into the field, it’s
a really exciting field right now. Those on the vendor side, I would recommend
keep looking to work with other solutions.
[3:04] Really advanced web methods or API set that you can publish out to other
technology providers and solutions providers really helps position your product
to be out in the forefront. Henrik: [3:16] Excellent. Thank you, Clayton. Clayton: [3:19] It’s been my pleasure. Henrik: [3:20] For more on Digital Asset Management, log onto AnotherDAMblog.com. Thanks again.
Another DAM Podcast 