Broadcast Engineering - April 2008 - (Page 54)

TECHNOLOGY IN TRANSITION NEW PRODUCTS & REVIEWS Asset management Increase the value of your future content. BY JOHN LUFF ankers understand asset management. They have a legal and ﬁduciary duty to protect assets and be able to tell you at any moment just where they are and what they are worth. They can’t abide by estimates nor can they lose track of them. You would be shocked to hear a banker say, “Your assets are in a merged account, we think, but trust me, we will somehow get them out for you.” It is not much different in many broadcast operations. One station in the United States, to remain unnamed, supposedly has archival news ﬁlm footage of NFL player Franco Harris’ “immaculate reception.” This footage is rumored to be the only actual video that might prove if Harris really caught the ball before it hit the ground. The content is located in a ﬁlm can, spliced — as was the custom in that era — along with all of the news footage from that night. It’s stored in the transmitter building, as was this station’s custom. It’s safe and secure, in B a location known to a rough degree, though checking to make certain would prove a challenge. It is possible the asset was lost 30 years ago. If you asked a broadcaster to develop a system that could track news assets, he might have difﬁculty doing this. There is no way to search for an asset without rummaging through boxes of deteriorating original news ﬁlm. Sometimes, it’s even worse at modern tapeless plants. Recordings is lost, along with any other metadata that might make it searchable. How to protect your assets There are, of course, ways to protect the assets and make it possible to extract additional value from them in the future. In a modern plant, where servers are often the central repository and master ingest point, assets and their metadata exist in their most complete form. Metadata recorded in In a modern plant, where servers are often the central repository and master ingest point, assets and their metadata exist in their most complete form. made on nonvolatile memory are transferred to disk for edit (or edited directly from the memory card), and often the only permanent record is a melt reel made at the end of a newscast. The melt reel holds all of the edited stories for legal and archive use. In such a case, the lineage of the shots the ﬁeld is (hopefully) transferred with the clips, and the edited material contains references to its heritage in the ﬁeld footage. What needs to happen to fully protect the asset and its value? One might glibly say, “use digital asset management (DAM)” software. This is partly true, but not completely. The asset needs to be available, which in the case of some systems means adding an archive or nearline storage system to clear space in the expensive online system for new content. A DAM software system performs several tasks. It can catalog the assets, making the best use of the metadata captured with the content and allowing additional metadata to be added to enhance the value of the content. It can also be coupled to an archive manager, which can use expert rules to move the content off the server automatically. In concert, the combination of DAM and archive manager represents key elements of a total workﬂow solution, but not the entire solution. This is one of the most confusing parts of analyzing and implementing complex software systems. Some Figure 1. Each of the storage elements, as well as the ingest from baseband or ﬁles sources, is being monitored by the DAM system. 54 broadcastengineeringworld.com | April 2008 http://broadcastengineeringworld.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Broadcast Engineering - April 2008

Broadcast Engineering - April 2008 Contents Editorial HD Newsrooms Wavelet Compression Mobile TV Audio Processing for HDTV, Part 1 QoE for IPTV End Users NAB Update Asset Management Advertisers Index

Broadcast Engineering - April 2008

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