» The idea of having everything in one place as your gold standard of truth is not realistic «
laughed out of the room. Five years ago, it would have been: ‘Yes, we have a whole gallery of primitive art.’ “So what are we investing in metadata? It puts a whole different scale on the AI investment to look at return and time to value... maybe metadata improvement is a capital cost? This gets into interesting conversations different from ‘I can compress that file and get it to New York that much faster.’” The zen of unstructured assets For Chris Fournelle, director, content and marketing production at Signiant, establishing the best practices and finding the best tools requires giving up the idea that you’re going to have total control over all of your content all the time. It’s no surprise to him that many companies have moved away from a monolithic, centralised MAM for storing their content. “Content is everywhere, and the complexity, speed and creativity the industry is trying to achieve makes things messy. It makes things disorganised. It makes things unstructured. Content is everywhere at various stages of the supply chain
and it’s no longer a linear process. The idea of having everything in one place as your gold standard of truth is probably not realistic.” With assets spread out across companies and the supply chain itself, what’s needed is a way to see into relevant assets, regardless of where they live. A layer like the Signiant Platform can enable federated search across all of your storage, whether it is in the cloud, on the premises or in any partner storage you have permission for. It’s funny we’re still stuck with the word ‘storage’ when digital content turns storage into something very immediate, which updates instantly. The story of asset management has been one of moving out of archives and more and more into the present.
“You could shoot something while it is being immediately sent to the studio location, where it is able to be played at a high resolution without making proxies, and can be clipped, downloaded or transcoded for dailies. Legal or script supervisors or whomever can look at it while it’s still being shot. At every step of the production cycle, stakeholders with access to it do not have to wait for it to go into the final stack.” Coordination first, tech second Chris McMahon, senior product marketing manager at Backlight, notes that this ability to effortlessly access multiple assets in multiple places brings its own problems. “If there’s a challenge people still experience today, it’s less of
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