When you have an effective Media Asset Management system (MAM), you always know what material you have, and — just as importantly — where to find it. Here are five ways this will help to grow your production company.
When you shoot a lot of video, you will find that you have shots that are great, and some that are forgettable. Others might simply be useful to illustrate a point whenever the subject comes up. And still more could be so specifically interesting that you could either sell them or at least use them to drive up traffic on your or someone else’s website. Repurposing your existing material can add up to be a significant source of income.
In fact, you can have as many categories of video as you like, but unless you can sort them and find them quickly, there’s not much point in keeping them. Essentially, if you can’t find it, you don’t have it.
An effective MAM would give you all the necessary tools to catalogue and tag your content and that can be achieved by a powerful custom metadata tools.
Asset management is complicated and it’s easy to misunderstand what’s going on in the heat of an important production, or simply to lose or accidentally delete material. With a digital workflow it’s often all-or-nothing. As a creative professional, you don’t want to work under this pressure.
A MAM will simplify your working life by taking over the difficult task of keeping track of all your media. It looks after multiple versions in multiple formats. And it forces you into good habits. The end result is that your processes are simpler and you’re less likely to get mired in the complexity of digital video production. It’s like having an expert watching over you, getting things just how you need them, exactly when you need them.
We’ve already seen that a media asset management system encourages you into good habits. This is a very good thing. Once you get into the habit of naming your files correctly, the time spent on doing this is paid back many times over because you can find your stuff easily. Even a simple search can reveal clips you’d forgotten about, or which, because they’re there in front of you, inspire new and better ways to complete your production.
A MAM will make searching easy, fast and effective
Above all, the simple ability to browse or search through your material and within seconds have the ideal clips on your timeline will reduce your production time and make your working life better.
With a MAM you can get your clients more involved. It’s so easy to get material in front of the client, that you absolutely can try multiple options. With near instant access to your material, it’s no longer a chore to find clips and insert them in your production.
With an effective MAM, you’ll be able to optimise every production by using the right material at the right time, and by including your own “stock” material that you’ve built up during other shoots. Quite apart from that, the very fact that it’s easier and quicker to manage your material means that you’ll spend more time creating and less on storing and looking for assets. It’s like having a really tidy house, no matter how busy you are. And of course, repurposing content will allow you to monetise it more effectively.
Professionals trust Sony to build great cameras. What you might not know is that for the last decade, Sony has been designing and building enterprise level media management and archiving systems. Now, this expertise is more affordable and available to everyone, in the form of Media Navigator and Sony’s Optical Disc Archive systems. Bringing these two together, Sony lets you create a truly easy to use scalable managed archive of all your material. Start with a single USB drive and grow into multi-slot library.
Click here to find out more about Sony’s Media Management and archiving solutions.