Digital Asset Management
August 3, 2010, Culver City, CA at the Creative Storage conference, Robert Black senior vice president of product and service department at Ascent Media talked about “Digital Storage In Contact Archiving And Asset Management: How Digital Asset Management Can Impact The Next Generation Of Media Production”
The laws applied to technology include the well-known Moore’s law and a lesser-known Kryder’s law. Both of these project a doubling process over a relatively short time frame. As a result, prices drop, and for storage, bandwidth and storage density also increase.
Within the media creation industry, the primary infrastructure is based on Linux boxes attached to massive storage arrays. In some operations, the users are connected to 5 petabytes of random access data. This data volume provides no easy way to backup files. As one solution, these production houses have gone to a distributed storage array with data striping enabled by low-cost storage equipment. Ascent Media has a digital vault for post production, content management, and distribution. This system addresses the challenges of changing dynamics, workflow silos, and different business model opportunities.
In the supply chain for production, existing solutions are mostly linear. The biggest challenge is storage management. An alternative to the linear model is to establish an integrated supply chain, that allows the flow from post through asset management to publish. The problems of data volume storage are exacerbated by the use of both equipment and site proprietary data types and functionality which must be maintained in both original and transcoded form. The solution for both of these problems is a universal distributed storage facility.
Users can ameliorate the problems by moving to a global naming specification which leads to greater functionality from the service layer and applications. For example, Citizen Global is a crowd-sourced media operation. Their content comes from any platform, any file type, and any capture device. They customize the content so it is optimized for playback in any platform. They must upload the various files and convert them to numerous output types for specific end platforms. However they do not control the delivery to that platform, they are purely an intermediary.
Their use of mezzanine formats enable a proliferation of output formats, at a cost of a significant increase in storage requirements and complexities. This diversity is under control right now. The future brings their biggest problem, which is what to do with the advances in technologies and software that require even more I/O formats or obsolete existing materials. The current thinking is that a structured incremental storage system would allow them to add storage in any increment and in any protocol or file format. For this to be universally implemented, the data on the storage needs a systematic metadata methodology for tagging and identifying the contents, so future recall use of the data is possible. At this time there are no metadata standards.
