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MillimeterMetadata Heaven
Aug 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Jeff Sauer
Universal, standards-based digital asset management is on the horizon, thanks to MPEG-7 and forward-thinking companies.
As an idle-time activity, I sometimes take my young son to our town library. He's too young to read, but he likes seeing the books, hearing the stories, leafing through the pages, and looking at the pictures. The Library of Congress cataloging system and the computer database used by all the nearby town libraries are, of course, completely foreign to him, but he's learned exactly where the train and construction books are — and that's enough for now.
Ideally, digital media asset management systems shouldn't be all that different from those of brick-and-mortar town libraries. There ought to be a similarly common standard for defining, organizing, and managing media assets, an equally consistent way to find media, and some way to browse media if you're not quite sure what you need to find. Unfortunately, that's really not the case, at least not today.
Digital media asset management has thus far been largely a custom task. A few competent and capable companies offer systems and services, but each tends to have its own methodology and proprietary descriptions of media. Few have the ability to share information, compare catalogs and assets, or exchange media with other companies' databases. Perhaps by design, switching from one system to another is impractical.
What's more, today's solutions are available only at premium prices. Besides large media-centric organizations with clear needs, few can afford them. That leaves average video producers with little opportunity for migration. Indeed, typical video pros probably understand today's media asset management about as well as my son understands systems like the Library of Congress.
That situation has to change if the category of asset management is to keep pace with the rest of the industry's move toward digital media. Video pros need to integrate asset management with the rest of organizational workflow and incorporate it into common practices. Fortunately, it's beginning to happen, thanks to both potential future standards and current practical solutions.
Once the Rage
Digital media asset management was all the rage a couple of years ago during the height of the dotcom boom. And why shouldn't it have been? “Everyone” was going to be a personal broadcaster, and every corporation was to have hundreds or thousands of digital media assets to track and distribute over the Web. Asset management companies and digital archivists were among the darlings of the day.
But like a lot of the excitement from those days, interest in the companies faded. The dying hype pressured remaining companies to prove they could provide real solutions to current problems. Not all did.
Unfortunately for smaller organizations, but not surprisingly, the solutions thus far have been custom applications primarily targeting the largest content owners — in other words, companies willing and able to pay the current prices.
Yet as smaller organizations increasingly rely on digital media from acquisition to distribution, the market for digital media asset management becomes broader. Video production studios, smaller advertising companies, educational institutions, and other organizations of somewhat more modest means are all potential customers as soon as solutions aren't so cumbersome and costly. Meanwhile, digital asset management companies are starting to realize that they cannot go it alone, and that's the first step toward broad-market, open-standard solutions.
Setting the Standard
The lack of industry standards is the problem the MPEG subcommittee of the ISO is attacking via MPEG-7. Formally known as the “Multimedia Content Description Interface,” MPEG-7 may seem like unlikely work for the math-head who developed the existing MPEG-1, -2, and -4 video and audio compression formats that now dominate much of digital media distribution. MPEG-7's charge doesn't prohibit new, more efficient audiovisual compression, but neither does it encourage it. Rather, MPEG-7 hopes to create an infrastructure within which existing and future digital formats, and even analog media, can be identified simply and thus used more efficiently.
MPEG-7 begins with the metadata object layer of existing MPEG-4 and expands upon it, with far more in-depth definitions of content, plus more types of content. More than basic copyright information, an MPEG-7 file could theoretically contain standard information about how a file was created and its subsequent use and alteration history. For example, an edited piece could include metadata about when and by whom the raw footage was shot, on what system the video was edited, and project data from that nonlinear system so the file could be re-opened if necessary. (The AAF format, already in use, can also include similar metadata.)
As with MPEG-4, security information within an MPEG-7 file could restrict access where license or royalty fees are due, and could even include past and future play schedules for widely distributed media. MPEG-7 attempts to set a standard manner in which digital media can be referenced, archived, and retrieved. MPEG-7 data files could also contain standard descriptors of the audiovisual material, although specific image-recognition techniques are likely to be beyond the scope of the standard.
Still, MPEG-7 could allow smart searches on content topics, specific video images and objects, audio sounds (perhaps including individual voices), and scene types so archivists can easily find pieces of relevant media.
MPEG-7 certainly could help standardize digital media asset management, but future standards have little practical appeal today, of course. For the time being, asset management companies are looking toward existing tools, like maturing XML tagging and Java, and using the metadata that's already available from digital formats like AAF. Fortunately, there's progress, and it's from some unlikely sources.
Integrating Asset Management
Telestream is not a digital asset management company, but rather one that has built a name with products that smoothly encode, transcode, and move digital assets from one place to another. The company's flagship product, the FlipFactory software encoding platform, automates the encoding and transcoding of media for exchange, distribution (including streaming), and archiving. A series of encoding and viewing appliances capture and play back media at remote locations and connect to a FlipFactory.
Telestream is a company that's helping to make digital asset management more accessible. Flipware, as the entire suite is called, has a plug-in architecture that allows metadata to be added during capture to the media files it creates. That metadata can be from existing information — like VBI data, MPEG header code, or even burned-in information — or via manual data entry. Then, through a series of straightforward third-party plug-ins, Flipware can translate and parse that metadata into the proprietary metadata formats and syntax of several of the major media asset management companies' databases.
Of course, Telestream's products are no dime-ante solutions. They cost well into four digits for just the base encoding solutions, and another four digits for each of the Conforming and Indexing modules needed to ingest and pass on metadata. Still, by supporting metadata ingestion during the capture process, Telestream is able to offload at least some of the work — and potentially some of the custom-setup expense of the large asset management systems. What's more, through a partnership with IBM, Telestream is beginning to prove that digital media asset management solutions can be made up largely of off-the-shelf components.
When my son gets older and learns how to use the library database to search for new books, those skills will apply to both the town and school libraries — or even to a nearby town's library.
Managing digital media brings a host of new issues to the old problem of organizing assets. Standard definitions of content and formats are critical as the industry matures — and, eventually, as “everyone” actually does have digital assets to manage and archive.
