Implementing a Digital Asset Management System

For Animation, Computer Games, and Web Development

Jens Jacobsen, Tilman Schlenker, Lisa Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780240806655
• eBook ISBN: 9781136035777
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Learn how the top CG film, computer game and web development companies have saved significant time and money on their projects by optimizing digital asset management systems and streamlining production processes. Also included is a product overview with 28 detailed descriptions of software solutions, including screenshots and prices, as well as a practical assessment of their suitability for different industries & project sizes.

1 Introduction

1.1  What is it all about?

In the modern workplace, we all create assets with any task we perform—regardless of our profession. We write e-mails, letters, and faxes. We create diagrams, flowcharts, and reports. We take pictures with our cameras and create videos. We write text messages and leave messages on voicemail systems. We write memos summing up meetings and phone conferences. As a consequence, finding things on a computer or even on a mobile phone—which today are more like PDAs—is more difficult than finding things on our desks!

Everyone knows how difficult it can be to keep things in order—be these tangible things we have to get our hands on, or digital things we can only get a hold of with the use of a technical device. In our private lives we can usually cope with this problem on our own (and if not, there are home organization consultants and entire stores filled with shelving and containers to help!). And sometimes we don’t mind searching—looking through the shoebox of all the pictures you took last year hunting for Tim’s wedding photos can be a lot of fun.

But at work, managing your assets poorly can waste valuable time and cause excessive frustration. On the organizational side, this burns too much money due to low productivity and lost assets. These problems prompted the evolution of Digital Asset Management as people tried to find ways to reduce search times, improve reliability, and increase productivity in the process of creating and handling assets.

1.2  What does this book cover?

This book contains all the information you need to make use of the best practices in Digital Asset Management that have been developed steadily over the last two decades. You will learn which techniques for workflow design, project management, and teamwork can be used to get better results and take the pain out of the process. You’ll have a checklist of what to look for if you plan to buy or build a software system that helps you with asset management. Step by step, you will compile your own specific requirements catalog. Then you can compare it with the features the systems available on the market have to offer and find out which of these is a good match.

The focus of this book is on the production process, so we will look at companies where the production is complex and product cycles are long. We show how you can benefit most from Digital Asset Management if you work in an industry—mainly game production, animation film, web design, and similar industries—that create complex digital products. But if you work in a design agency, a photographer’s studio, or manage a complex website, you will also benefit from this book. Since it is not industry specific, anyone interested in improving the way they work with digital assets will gain lots of new ideas.

Several case studies point out common problems and open your eyes to similar situations in your own company—often, we are so used to our own habits that even glaring problems are overlooked. Success stories from well-known companies reveal how some of the most powerful global players in game production, animation film, and web design are working. These examples provide models for your own firm—even if your projects are smaller or less complicated.

1.3  What’s an asset anyway?

Defining an asset is not an easy task. The word stems from the financial world, where an asset is something of a certain value like cash, real estate, stocks and shares, or a piece of art.

In the IT and media world there are two widely accepted definitions for assets, both of which aren’t completely satisfactory. Both agree that a digital asset includes a digital file, but one definition says an asset is a digital file plus the rights to use it, and the other definition states that an asset is a digital file plus a description of it—the so-called metadata.

The first definition (asset = file + rights) is more widely used in the context of assets that have a certain value on their own. For example, think of an MP3 file of a song from your favorite band. From a business perspective, it is useless as long as you don’t have the right to do something with it—i.e., use it in a movie you make, sample it in your own song, or broadcast or sell it to your customers. That means that only the file together with the rights to do something with it build an asset.

Figure 1.1  The two most common definitions of a digital asset

The second definition (asset = file + metadata) comes from the usage in large companies. A file containing information is only useful if you know what is in it. This might sound trivial if you only have a collection of files you created yourself. In this case, the metadata is either stored in your own brain (you know what is inside), or it is easy to generate the metadata on the fly (you can just open the file and see what is inside). But this approach becomes impractical if you have hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of files which are created by many different people. Then it becomes essential to tag the files with the relevant information about their contents to make it possible to retrieve them. Otherwise, they will be lost in the sheer amount of information. That is why only a file together with metadata is considered an asset.

These two concepts are complementary. Of course, a file you can find easily but you don’t have the right to use is not an asset to you. On the other hand, a file you have the right to use but which you can’t find due to missing metadata is not much of an asset either.

For this book it is not necessary to nit-pick—we won’t deal much with theory here. We will simply consider an asset to be a digital file you just need. That’s the reason why you want to manage it, and to do so you need metadata. Metadata can be as simple as the filename itself, the time the file was created and modified, and to which program it belongs.

1.4  What is Digital Asset Management?

Digital Asset Management is a way of keeping an overview of your digital files and making sure they don’t get lost or altered unintentionally. You can do this simply by using sensible directory structures and consistent names, and by tracking carefully what happens with your files and what is in them.

But usually you will want to use an application to help with this because as the number of files and team size increase, the greater the difficulty in dealing with the assets. Managing digital assets without a Digital Asset Management system soon becomes quite a headache for all.

The first pioneers who used DAM systems were media producers, the publishing industry and large corporations. In media and publishing, the main challenge was to collect images, audio and video assets, to publish/broadcast them, and to archive them. In large corporations, millions of documents had to be stored and retrieved. With the advent of the Web, everyone publishing there faced similar problems. With the growing number of files created every day and their increasing size and complexity, asset management became necessary in virtually every industry. Now, Digital Asset Management is a widely used practice and has proven its return on investment within a short time in countless cases.

Today, DAM systems come in many different flavors—from simple to set up and use Open Source solutions available for free, to complex commercial packages that take months to implement and cost several million dollars.

In this book we will concentrate on systems that provide great benefits to productions, but that are still reasonable in terms of price and effort to implement at small to mid-sized companies in the web design, game production, and animation film fields.

Figure 1.2  Some common types of digital asset files

Figure 1.3  Some different types of Digital Asset Management systems and their specialties

Note that hardware like tape libraries, special networks, or disk arrays is sometimes labeled with the tag DAM, but these topics are beyond the scope of this book.

1.5  How is this book structured?

The structure of this book follows the steps you should take when implementing a Digital Asset Management system in your own firm:

Chapter 1, which you are currently reading, gets you ready to kick off your quest for a DAM solution.

Chapter 2 will reveal what can happen without DAM, and how it can be avoided. It describes numerous problems, some of which will seem familiar and some you might not even know you have. You’ll also discover where Digital Asset Management can help.

Chapter 3 helps you to assess your current situation. First find out where you are, and then where you want to go.

In Chapter 4, you’ll learn how to plan for your needs by compiling a list of all the essential and nice-to-have functions a DAM solution should provide for your team. Evaluating this list should help you determine what can realistically and successfully be implemented given your individual situation.

Chapter 5 is your guide to the right solution. You’ll explore the many different types of Digital Asset Management systems available to help you find your way through the feature lists posted on websites and in brochures. And you’ll learn how to ask the sales representatives the right questions to make sure you get everything you need, but don’t pay for unnecessary features.

Chapter 6 will take you through implementing the system you have chosen. It points out common problems and explains how to avoid them, or work with them if they do arise. It covers technical aspects as well as how to prepare the team for your new way of working.

Chapter 7 presents the approach to asset management taken by several renowned companies. You will see how famous computer game producers like Lionhead Studios tame their enormous projects, like the development of their acclaimed game Black & White. You’ll read about Sony Pictures’ best practices to keep the development of feature-length animation films with terabytes of data under control. And you can find out how Scholz & Volkmer keeps pace with the production of a large and complex website while making sure quality and timeline targets are met.

Finally, the Appendices offer a wealth of additional information: an extensive overview on the most relevant DAM solutions on the market today, with an assessment of their strengths and weaknesses; a glossary with important keywords, buzzwords, and phrases; and references for other sources of information, like books and websites, if you want to explore a topic further.

Now, let’s dive into the next chapter and find out what Digital Asset Management can do for you!

2 What can asset management do for you?

2.1 What can happen…

In this chapter we’ll look at all the problems that can arise during production, and you’ll see how Digital Asset Management can help you avoid these obstacles in future productions.

Most of us know this story all too well. With fresh energy, the team starts a new project. Everyone is eager to push things forward, and every day more and more content is produced. The creative folks write conceptual documents, draw mind maps, and spin out idea after idea. Graphical artists scribble on any surface available. Project managers hold numerous meetings and produce piles of memos, protocols, and memorandums. Countless e-mails are written and received.

But sooner or later, the project manager gets this odd feeling. Is everything really under control? Does he have an accurate assessment of the project’s progress? Maybe the creative people are start...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What can asset management do for you?
• 3 Assess your individual situation
• 4 Plan what you need
• 5 Find the right solution
• 6 Implement the solution
• 7 Success stories
• Appendix 1: Product overview
• Appendix 2: Glossary
• Appendix 3: References
• Index