an accessibility problem, but more of a coordination problem. “A company will come to us with a producer who needs to find a clip from a shoot that was six months ago – but that footage lives on a NAS (network-attached storage) somewhere, or maybe got moved to an S3, but nobody’s sure. There’s a folder structure, but it only makes sense to the person who set it up. So the producer is messaging three different people and waiting for somebody to dig through drives. They pull it down, then realise it’s the wrong version. These are the kind of things we hear a lot.” In this stressful example, there is no technological reason why the producer’s clip can’t immediately be found. The stumbling block is the lack of good-old human planning and oversight – including agreed-on metadata. McMahon says the basics of storage hygiene and coordination are the first talking points when working with customers. “Without that coordination and governance, you can have all of your assets available in one form or another, but it will fail. It will impact
the economics – duplicate storage can account for 30 to 40% of media spend. All of this access can quickly become this uncontrolled variable.” One of the – many – promises made by AI companies is that you won’t need to have a plan when it comes to working with assets and content. An AI will train itself on all of your content and processes and you’ll just have to ask it to perform tasks, which it will execute perfectly and without complaint. The truth is AI is useful in MAM’s speech-to-text tools, which are the hero of modern media management. Face detection is also a useful AI feature. But it’s easy for companies to get enticed by AI just to overly complicate tasks and spend too much money – and carbon and water – on something that will eventually need to be done by a human. Meaning, supplied through human- created metadata, is where business value is most likely to come from. Getting practical with PAM “I’ve been around thousands of MAM projects in my day and have seen many of them fail,” says Derek
Barrilleaux, CEO of Projective. “One of the reasons is that what they need isn’t a MAM, it’s a PAM.” A production asset management (PAM) system helps companies with the problem of managing assets during the production and content- publishing process, which now has a much longer lifespan than it used to. “MAMs are great for distribution, management and repurposing of finished assets, providing a long-term library and managing rights. They are good at orchestrating the flow of these assets around a big facility, but ill-suited for the chaotic, work-in- progress part of things.” There is much technical literature written – by David Lipsey and experts at Toronto Metropolitan University, for a start – about what constitutes an asset. But, as with the states of matter, assets can exist in different energetic forms before they finally cool off for long-term archiving. Although, as we’ve seen, companies also need to be able to publish their archived material quickly when called upon. The early, diffuse and liquid state of assets has to be managed with tools that are more process
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