August 1, 2002

Millimeter Magazine

METADATA ENTRY
by Dan Ochiva

If old clips are inaccessible, they're not worth the length of Beta tape on which they're hidden.

Though companies pushing asset management systems -; today dubbed either MAM (media asset management) or DAM (digital asset management) -; have come and gone, the importance of this category has not faded.

And despite the fact that no off-the-shelf solution has gained any degree of wide acceptance, facility owners are still keenly interested in the highly customized world of asset management. That's because assets, by definition, are valuable. Here's a look at two facilities that recently made the leap into uncharted asset-management waters and emerged with systems that have proven time-saving, revenue-generating, or both.

Big Bird's New Business Plan

We're in the content-repurposing business," says Rob Schuman, director, technical operations at Sesame Workshop, the producers of Sesame Street and other popular children's fare. "Sesame Street was the very first show developed with repeatable segments. Metadata? I'll tell people we've been collecting metadata on index cards for about 30 years."

But Schuman knew that index cards, no matter how full of information, did not offer a useful solution in today's increasingly crowded, competitive marketplace for children's programming.

Sesame Workshop's solution? First, spend 18 months and $1.5 million to move 7,500 hours of its analog archive to a digital tape format -; mainly Digital Beta -; for a master archive. Next, create MPEG-2 versions of the most frequently used shows and sequences, storing the files on Ampex's high-speed DST tape library. (The full archive is slowly being converted to MPEG-2.) Finally, integrate Venaca's Digital Archive media asset management (MAM) system into the production company's day-to-day operation, enabling quick access to its most important assets, those MPEG-2 files.

Schuman says that he chose Venaca's system for both its affordability and its wide application to post. The software's ruling paradigm was important, too: Create both full-resolution MPEG-2 images and database-searchable MPEG-1 proxies during the ingest process. Other MAMs he evaluated work by first generating low-res proxies. For final edits, users then either go to the original tape or re-digitize that tape at a higher resolution.

The Venaca system thus emphasizes conversion of all broadcast resources to a digital format before actual use. "We decided it was necessary to preserve our assets in the highest possible quality that we can," says Schuman. "From there, we can go out to any medium we want. We can now go to Real Media or QuickTime for the Web, to videotape, or even, in a current deal we're working on in Japan, on to [mobile] phones." Currently, Sesame Workshop has three shows on the air: Sesame Street and two animated series, Dragon Tales and Sagwa. As the most recent show, Sagwa became proof of a concept for a more complete deployment of the MAM system, as it includes digital proxies of every show and show segment, all of the artwork, as well as promotional material. Along with that, Schuman has digitized all the associated paperwork: scripts, show summaries, a show "bible," character descriptions, press releases, bios, and pictures of directors, writers, animators, and so on.

Even though it is too unwieldy to fully digitize the full 30 years of Sesame Street's auxiliary material, the MAM software has already made it feasible, for example, to work on a joint venture with Berlitz to create an English language learning series, with relevant material (think "Today's letter is A") quickly pulled from the archive.

"It's been so successful," says Shuman, "that once when we brought the system down for some maintenance, I got a phone call from a woman who was actually crying that she couldn't get on."