The Handbook, commissioned by CEPIC, is a PDF package of documents which includes Image Metadata Planning - a guide for business users, papers on the legal framework for metadata use, quick reference charts on the use of IPTC Core and Extension fields, and an interactive metadata workflow planning tool for selecting IPTC fields for use in various stages of a business workflow.
Paul Brown, Head of CEPIC's Technical Committee said “We commissioned this Handbook to make it easier for our members and other businesses to get to grips with their metadata workflow. The Handbook approaches metadata from a practical business point of view. We are very pleased to be partnering with the IPTC to bring this important subject to our members and to the wider business community.”
“Data drives automation and enables companies to manage images profitably," says Sarah Saunders, member of the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group, who authored the guide. “The Guide to Metadata Planning should be accessible to all business users as well as their technical staff, and we have provided work tools - the charts on use of IPTC fields and the metadata planning chart - to help with the workflow planning process. Together with the Embedded Media Metadata Manifesto newly published by the IPTC we hope that the CEPIC/IPTC Metadata Handbook will form a useful part of the metadata toolkit for businesses handling all kinds of media.”
The Handbook is available for download from the CEPIC website and the IPTC website.
In preparation for the Second Annual DAMMY Awards, we interviewed 2010 DAMMY Award winner for Best Strategy or Solution for Digital & Media Asset Management during the Acquisition of Content, Michael Cioni (Light Iron Digital):
How did you get into the digital asset management space?
My motivation for getting involved in the DAM space comes from a rapidly changing media ecosystem that is clearly affecting every corner of the market. Sort of like a significant climate change or volcanic eruption, everything that falls within a certain distance from the epicenter is affected in a cascade-like effect that starts small and gets bigger and bigger and bigger. This type of trend is great for our business because we know that investments, research and attention to DAM content are ascending businesses, whereas alternative and more traditional tools are on the decline.
What do you see as the biggest challenge(s) in digital asset management?
Education. Plain and simple. The more I research and evaluate past trends of all types of tools and technologies, the more I find that people forget to look to the past in order to help predict trends in the future. The transition to exclusive dependence on file-based acquisition and digital asset management is not unlike the transition from flatbeds to AVID, or vinyl to CD, or type-setters to word processing. Evolutionary steps towards file-based manipulation are nothing new to the world, but they are new to major motion pictures. Educating a group of industry professionals and master of the craft is where we focus a huge percentage of our time. In fact, an average of 6 hours per week is spent teaching producers, directors and editorial members about digital asset management at Light Iron. Our transparency and training are critical in building a better future for DAM.
How do you see DAM looking 10 years from now?
Ten years from now will be a very different place for data asset management. The main difference will be that a large percentage of our society will consider DAM a normal part of their life. The concept of "rewind" and "record" will be virtually forgotten. "Sound Speed!" will be a saying that people use, but they will forget its origin. "We're filming right now" will even go away as society will start to replace the verb of "film" with words like "capture."
The transition from asset capturing systems like film and tape are declining at an alarming rate. So fast that many people are unaware of the change because it's hard to tell the difference unless you are evaluating these technological and creative trends from the inside. The community should be aware that film-acquired projects now make up less than 50% of all captured media (print, television and feature film) and that 2009-2010 was the last year in history where film was the dominant acquisition format. Furthermore, the speed in which file-based acquisition is being adapted is probably likely to double it's penetration each year for the next 5 years, until it makes up 95% of the market for motion picture in (what I predict) will be 2016. By that time, file-based acquisition will run the market forever and the leftover 5% will be for formats that people choose to use for specialized creative reasons only because those formats will be expensive to shoot, expensive to post and in limited supply.
How do you use DAM in your personal life?
I personally am dependent on file-based tools as much at home as I am at work. At home, I keep two databases of drive archives for all my past and present assets. I break down the assets of my life into "active" and "passive" categories, which allows me to store non-essential content from my past on a separate system than the more prominent assets I need on a more routine basis. I also have a set of drives that I no longer use from the past. Those drives are plugged in and spun-up semi-annually to ensure they are still in working order. With two copies and routine spin-up maintenance and mounting, I am easily able to make media last for more than 10 years with out expensive or time-consuming methods and without the risk of losing anything, no matter how insignificant. The longest drives that I own and still run with data have just turned 11 years old.
Why is it important for people to attend Createasphere’s DAM Conference?
It's important to attend Createasphere's DAM conference because it's one of the rare places where people can get focused and nearly exclusive access to the industry's brightest minds that are building the roadmap for the future. Currently, it is fairly rare to have such a concentration of digital asset management companies all working together to explore and exhibit DAM tools. But even more important than the equipment at this DAM conference is the fact that there will be personalities there as well. It is the people that can make DAM sink or swim, and having the opportunity to interface directly with people is one of the most valuable components to Createasphere's mission.
What have you been working on since receiving the 2010 DAMMY Award for “Best Strategy or Solution for Digital & Media Asset Management during the Acquisition of Content”? Does Light Iron Digital have any new strategies in workflow that you can share with us?
Since receiving the DAMMY Award in 2010, Light Iron has been developing a larger fleet of OUTPOST on-set post production. We have developed new additions to our fleet with our LilyPad systems for color correction, iPad applications and increased our impact on the market to by providing the post production on some of the worlds largest 2D and 3D feature films without the use of the post house. Like all good ideas, they start small and work their way small, slow and steady from the bottom of the community until they become the normal way in which all people think, talk and execute their work, regardless of the budget.
Techie Talk - The Digital Archive's New Leading Role in Media Workflows
Written by Janet Lafleur, Atempo
No longer a dusty storehouse of videotape or film, the digital archive has taken a new role as critical, active element in the workflow. By following some simple strategies, you can protect digital assets from ingest to long-term archive, optimize storage through automatic archive, and streamline workflows for monetizing content.
To get the most out of your archive solution investment, we recommend you follow these six archive strategies:
Strategy 1: Archive Early: Preserve raw footage in the archive
If your cameras have reusable capture media, you’re losing the natural backup tape that videotape or film provided.
Strategy 2: Archive Often: Use automatic archiving to reduce clutter
Like an office refrigerator that everyone uses, but no one owns, shared storage can get out of control. Automatically migrate stale data to a low-cost archival media.
Strategy 3: Archive Direct: Empower everyone to archive and retrieve directly
An easy-to-use interface lets editors and producers search and retrieve content for re-use, so they can get started working on new projects immediately.
Strategy 4: Archive Open: Avoid proprietary workflow components
Your archive shouldn’t be tied to your hardware vendor, a shared file system or to a specific DAM provider. Open solutions last longer.
Strategy 5: Archive Near, Archive Deep: Set up intelligent multi-tier archives
Not all archive content is created equal. Your archive should know whether the content is on the near-line or deep archive and let you access it transparently.
Strategy 6: Archive Forever: Plan for large-scale preservation projects
A dusty storehouse of tape can be a content gold mine. Archive solutions built for large-scale preservation projects let you monetize that content—before it’s too late.
For a detailed white paper on the Digital Archive in Media Workflows, visit: http://atempo.com/products/digitalArchive/resources/wp_primetime_dl.asp
To hear Janet Lafleur speak in a recent webcast alongside Cynthia Parrish (Harrris) and Jim Sipple (Willow Creek Community Church) - watch here.
Our second annual DAMMY Awards will be judged by three recognized leaders in digital asset management. This month, we spotlight one of our esteemed judges: Mark Davey, Partner, Cliffe Associates Ltd, CTO of Print Media Centr, human aggregator of the digitalassetmanagement.org.uk blog, and creator of the DAM Foundation.
How did you get into the digital asset management space?
The marketing agency I worked for over ten years ago had a contact with an engineering buying group to service the group and the member companies. They were looking to produce a large 600-page catalogue for their 120 members with over 200 suppliers, and simultaneously utilize the content on members’ websites.
The only way to effectively manage so much content with so many different companies was via a digital asset management solution.
Why is Digital Asset Management so critical?
The short answer is the exponential growth of digital assets at every level of business.
As we consume more digital media, we become media companies in the execution of our marketing, publishing and business channels. Marketing is media in the digital world. In order to create, collaborate, execute and analyze these assets, their value and the long tail of demand, we need to harness the potential of a good DAM system.
In your day-to-day operations, how many technologies do you utilize to provide a DAM solution?
As vendor agnostic consultants, we help clients choose the very best solution for them based on an analysis of need, budget and definition of the business case. We offer insights into a strategic plan which encompasses the advantage of doing the hard work now, future proofing the solution for the years ahead being mindful of the changes rapidly taking place. I have personally vetted over 40 vendor systems and will be looking to double that over the next eighteen months.
We use a multitude of different systems and technologies on behalf of our clients and in our day-to-day engagements they embrace all levels from enterprise, SaaS and open source. Lately we are seeing more cloud based technologies being adopted and we see this trend increasing.
Do you consider anyone to be industry leaders?
Who has the best DAM system in the market place? This is the one question we get asked most by clients and prospects alike. We always respond with none. Each offers something that the others do not. The choice is wholly dependent on the client’s requirements. Of course the bigger players have deeper pockets with more reach and have an advantage in terms of the collective knowledge. But other criteria need to be examined. In my experience there is too much of a rush to appoint a vendor before the business case has been clarified. This can lead to a long term disappointment and often an unnecessary overspend. The business case has to come first. The life and journey of the asset needs to be explored. Only then can the right vendor choice be made.
Why is it important for people to attend Createasphere’s DAM Conference?
DAM can be simple at one level, yet it covers a number of complexities and professional genres. Createasphere has structured their DAM conference to help transmit that knowledge for a wide range of participants. Industry leaders and panelists alike are sharing their experience and knowledge for the benefit of all who attend. Those who truly participate will gain a great deal.
Rob Hummel currently serves as the Chair of the Public Programs Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences’ Science and Technology Council and sits on the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee. Rob has hosted several programs at the Academy on film formats, film technology, and 3D stereoscopic imaging. He is also an associate member of the American Society of Cinematographers and was the editor of the 8th edition of the American Cinematographer Manual. Hummel will moderate the keynote panel “Mission Critical” at the Digital Asset Management Conference.How did you get into Digital Asset Management?
My career has always been closely tied to the preservation of Motion Pictures. I realized early on the value of archiving color negatives to B&W 35mm Separation masters. Color negatives could fade, while B&W never faded, and were especially stable archivally when combined with polyester based film (what Eastman Kodak calls Estar™).
Also, the restorations of "Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind" that I was involved with further helped me appreciate the value of long term storage of valuable assets.
My sole purpose of my current company, Group 47, LLC is to take advantage of some incredible technology for storing digital information that would be stable for no less than 100 years. With recommended storage temperature range of 10º to 40º C, it's an amazingly green technology as well. So, I'm excited how everyone will benefit from it.
Why are Digital Asset Management and Digital Preservation so critical?
Everything we create now is either originated digitally, or very quickly transformed into a digital format. Finding those assets so we can make use of them is no small task, since the quantities of information we're talking about needing to keep track of far outstrip anything the Dewey Decimal System was meant to track!
Digital Preservation is critical because at this time, there is no digital format that could be remotely considered archival in the constraints of how any archivist would define archival; that is something that will last a century. Most magnetic media requires migration within five years to prevent loss of data. Spinning disks consume massive amounts of power for air conditioning, and are vulnerable to magnetic damage from EMP (both intentional and accidental) or even solar flares.
We need to ensure that the massive amounts of digital information our society is now generating is safe and secure so that future generations will be able to access it. If we don't ensure that data is able to be secured without the need for electrical power, we run the very real risk of losing critical historical, artistic, and cultural information.
What do see as the biggest challenge(s) in digital asset management?
Standardization. SO many people are implementing their own approaches to DAM, we run the risk of none of them becoming established. One thing is clear: DAM must be designed and implemented by the users of DAM, not the manufacturers. So that's the challenge, to make sure that the users get what they want, and don't have some half-baked proprietary solution foisted on them.
How do you use DAM in your personal life?
I suppose you could say that all I do in my personal life is use iPhoto to catalog and organize my family's photographs. Other than using Apple's spotlight search engine to find things on my many hard drives, I confess, I don't have a DAM solution implemented in my personal life!
How do you see DAM looking 10 years from now?
Well, 10 years ago, only the most enlightened were talking about DAM, and now everyone is. I would hope in another 10 years, we'll see an implementation that meets the needs of archivists and is easy enough for anyone to archive, access, protect, and find any information.
Why is it important for people to attend Createasphere’s DAM conference & expo?
I think it's a great opportunity to hear what approaches in DAM are being implemented now, and in turn gives those attending a chance to question, challenge, and embrace the ideas they hear.
Hopefully, at the end of it all, we'll have learned more and gotten new inspiration on how to make DAM achieve a design that is almost as ubiquitous as the Dewey Decimal became.
Andrea Kalas has been Vice President of Archives at Paramount Pictures since 2009. She has worked as an archivist at the British Film Institute, Discovery Communications, DreamWorks and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. She is a former President of AMIA and holds a Masters from UCLA in film history. She recently presented a paper on digital preservation at The Reel Thing in August.
Q: How did you get into the digital asset management (archiving) industry?
A: When I worked at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, I gave a presentation at an AMIA conference about how closed caption text could be extracted into a searchable file for television news researchers. This was the spark, and one thing led to another. I eventually found myself working with some brilliant technologists on a digital archive for DreamWorks Animation.
Q: What do see as the biggest challenge(s) in digital asset management? Have you found creative solutions?
A: The biggest challenge is that the phrase is used to describe so many functions and solutions - just defining what DAM means to the specific project or operation is the first step.
The most satisfying solutions for me have been the times when I have found ways of automatically moving assets and metadata into a system by setting up simple rules and requirements upstream from the system.
Q: In your day-to-day operations, how many technologies do you utilize to provide a DAM solution? Do you consider any the industry leaders?
A: I have seen many digital asset management systems come and go that claim to do it all. The issue is that there is not one technology to provide a full DAM solution, just as there is not just one skill set. A good DAM solution is the result of people with, among others, strong archiving, software integration and systems engineering skills.
Q: Where do you turn for knowledge and information?
A: I turn to my colleagues, the good professional groups like AMIA, online forums like Masters of Digital Assets, and conferences like the Createasphere DAM conference.
Q: How do you use DAM in your personal life?
A: If I told you, I'd have to kill you...seriously how you manage your own digital files them is going to be an increasingly private thing. We'll no longer be storing very sensitive data in boxes in the bedroom closet and we'll have to find clever ways of using available tools. But my philosophy is the same at home as it is at work: preserving files means keeping them documented well and in a managed infrastructure, not on removable media on a shelf.
Q: How do you see DAM 10 years from now?
A: I think we'll take digital preservation a lot more seriously than we do now, and I think there will be more and more clever ways to integrate film production, for example, with a final digital archive. I think we will have increasing access to amazing and interesting films, documentaries, television programs that are yet to be digitized.
Techie Talk - The Top 12 Myths about Embedded Photo Metadata
The Top 12 Myths about Embedded Photo Metadata
Written by David Riecks
There are a number of myths or misconceptions that surround the practice of embedding information such as IPTC, IPTC-IIM, XMP or even Exif into a digital image file — like JPEGs, TIFFs, Photoshop, DNG and other Raw files). There are a number of applications or utilities which can do this easily and safely, but first, let's take a look at the list.
- Embedded photo metadata is something that is hard to read unless you have photoshop or some other professional software application.
- If I embed my copyright (or caption or keywords, or other metadata field) into my images it will always be there.
- Embedding photo metadata adds a lot of disk space overhead to an image file.
- If I embed photo metadata in the images I place on my website, then search engines will be able to spider them and use the caption and other information to rate/rank my images.
- Images that I upload to my social media or photo sharing sites will still retain my embedded photo metadata.
- Removing embedded photo metadata is against the law.
- All embedded metadata is the same.
- Picasa (or iPhoto) writes all my captions into my embedded metadata as soon as I enter them.
- Adding copyright and contact information to images on the Internet makes websites load slowly.
- Adding photo metadata, like copyright and contact information, is difficult to do and time consuming.
- Metadata is always stored inside the image file (OR Metadata is always stored outside the image file).
- The topic of metadata is beyond the competence of the everyday user.
Let me stress, if it wasn't clear before, that the above statements are common misunderstandings about photo metadata, meaning that they are not correct. If you want to understand why, read on for a short summary of each, as well as links to other resources that should help you understand.
http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/blog/top-metadata-myths.html
In addition to clarifying these misconceptions, David was kind enough to share a really good tip and it is FREE!
IPTC PLUS Toolkit for Adobe Creative Suite Now Availalble:
The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) and the Picture Licensing Universal System (PLUS) have jointly developed a plug-in metadata panel for use in Adobe Bridge (CS3 or higher) which allow users to read/write the full set of fields included in the IPTC Core, IPTC Extension and the PLUS metadata schemas.
Metadata are considered as being critical to the photo business as they are used for searching pictures and to indicate the rights and terms of their use. The tools are, as all IPTC and PLUS applications, free of charge and can be downloaded from the IPTC or PLUS websites.
The included tools will help photographers, image libraries and photo agencies to store detailed descriptions of their content and data relevant for managing image copyrights -- directly in the images.
The release of this free IPTC-PLUS Toolkit means that anyone with compatible versions of Adobe Bridge will now have the means to easily embed the full set of IPTC fields as well PLUS metadata to digital images. Power users will love the fact that with this IPTC-PLUS Metadata panel you can now export out a full set of metadata fields into a Tab Separated Value (TSV) plain text file. In addition, you can modify that data and then import the resulting information through the same Metadata panel so that it is embedded directly into the file.
Also included in the download are comprehensive user guidelines, mapping charts and example images. The user guidelines define each of the fields available in the Adobe CS5 File Info dialogue, as well as those in the IPTC-PLUS Metadata Panels (IPTC Core, IPTC Extension and
PLUS Schemas are covered). The field mapping charts will help those that are used to working with other image metadata tools, and the provided images are preloaded with embedded photo metatadata so you can test if the value of a field is shown in the expected field in the user interface.
Read more and download the IPTC-PLUS Toolkit at http://www.iptc.org/goto?iptcplustoolkitadobecs the download file is in the side bar at the right (a 9.1 mb download).
The DAMMY Awards debuted on September 24th in New York, recognizing companies and individuals who have pushed the boundaries of the burgeoning digital asset management industry. Industry insiders and luminaries gathered at The New Yorker Hotel to celebrate the nominees and winners at a gala luncheon.
Categories and winners are:
- DAMMY of the Year - Jason Bright, MediaBeacon
- Best Storage, Archive and or Preservation Solution - UPS
- Best Example of Asset & Media Repurposing - Interaktion gmbh for Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)
- Best Strategy or Solution for Digital & Media Asset Management During the Acquisition of Content - Light Iron Digital, Michael Cioni
The DAMMY Awards are Createasphere's awards for excellence in digital asset management and cap the Digital Asset Management Conference and Exposition in New York. Mary Yurkovic, Manager of Createasphere's Digital Asset Management Conference and Exposition presenting the DAMMY's noted, "The caliber of entries was simply outstanding and every one of the nominees presented a stellar case. We are extremely proud to inaugurate the DAMMY's, we believe that these awards illustrate the critical role digital asset management is playing and will play across a wide spectrum of industries." Entries came from established and up and coming professionals.
As the honorary winners of the category Best Storage, Archive and or Preservation Solution, we are pleased to share with you how UPS was able to make a world-class storage, archive, and preservation solution within their organization.
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