It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in: with 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each minute, there’s a good chance you’re producing more and more media assets with each passing day. To meet increasing content demands, you need efficient ways to create, store, access, and manage all of this content.
This is where Media Asset Management (MAM) comes in. MAM takes digital asset management to the next level by providing an ecosystem in which video and audio, alongside traditional images and text, are created, reviewed and stored. It’s not uncommon for companies that shift from traditional asset management to MAM to increase their total content production by 25% while reducing their turnaround time by 40%.
How is this accomplished? Below are three benefits of adopting a MAM solution.
1. Get Control of Versions (Stop Doing Things Twice)
Have you ever gone to retrieve an old video file, only to find that the various versions weren’t tracked or labeled correctly? Or have you ever been in the middle of a project, and found that at some point throughout the review process someone began working on an old version of a file by mistake?
When assets (and their iterations) can’t be located efficiently, there are typically two outcomes:
- Creative must spend hours sifting through old files, trying to find what they need.
- Creative spends hours recreating an asset that someone already spent time making.
MAM solves these problems through intuitive version tracking and total visibility into who worked on what, when, and in what capacity. This lets you cut down on time spent searching for files and redoing work, which results in increased productivity (and reduced headaches).
2. Real-Time Collaboration
Traditionally, work on a media asset is limited to one person at a time. This can create a whole host of issues. Bottlenecks, where everyone is waiting for one person to finish their role, are common and can delay timelines; stakeholders can end up editing or commenting on outdated versions; and team members have a different experience depending on which device they are viewing the media.
Why is old-school asset management so woefully inadequate for collaboration? Because it was only made for storing finished products, not creating them.
Specific MAM solutions revolutionize collaboration by creating a space in which collaboration can occur during all phases of content creation, in real-time. Teams in disparate locations and with a diverse array of core competencies can work on the same piece of content. All stakeholders in the editing and review process can view and comment on the latest in-progress work. Everything takes place within the MAM ecosystem, ensuring a seamless experience across operating systems and devices.
3. Ingestion: How Do You Store Your Assets?
For modern content creators, the ingestion of media assets into the data repository represents an unacceptable inconvenience. Content creators – particularly video creators – without a MAM solution often find themselves saving a file in Adobe Premiere, opening a web browser, and uploading a 50 gig video file into the repository.
While this is fine for organizations with limited content production, it’s not uncommon for video editors to need to upload a file as frequently as every 15 minutes. Even if you need to repeat the process hourly, this method wastes a significant amount of time.
Enter MAM. A MAM solution lets creators sync large amounts of files into the repository with the click of a button. Certain MAM systems will even include the option to sync from directly within your content creation and editing platform (i.e. Adobe CC).
Want to learn more about how MAM can benefit your organization? Check out Evolphin Zoom today.