Digital Media Asset Management: upstream functions

The first article in this series described the move towards all-digital media and the systems that produce, manage and distribute them, enabling all media to be stored on computer media. But to be able to find what you're looking for in a mass of digital data, you need to set up Digital Media Asset Management, or DMAM (or simply MAM, or DMM), i.e. the management of digital audio, photo and video media.

To achieve this, additional data, or metadata (detailed in the previous article), is associated with the data representing the sounds or images, to identify them and describe both the content and the container (format). Digital media can then be managed throughout a digital production-distribution chain. This is the aim of the three articles ([TE 5 887], , and ) to detail each of the functions present along this DMAM-managed chain.

The functions of a [23][17][18] DMAM system are shown in figure 1 . They are represented in a relatively "chronological" order in three blocks (corresponding to the last three articles in this series), from acquisition to distribution. In order of functional importance, they are :

• key functions: analyze-index, which enables the search function ;

• support functions for these key functions: storing (digital media and metadata) and managing data and metadata;

• upstream functions: acquisition and editing ;

• downstream functions: distributing on networks and digital media, selling while securing digital media, managing and protecting rights;

• a transversal function supporting all these functions: managing the processes implemented in the complete DMAM system.

This article focuses on the first three functions: acquisition, analysis and indexing, and...