automation & asset management feature
better to focus on what you need at each stage, and let the underlying technology - which is a bunch of computers now - do the hard work of converting field names or data orders. It is not rocket science: XML is a very simple language and is great for this sort of application.
Many of you will have had the experience of shifting address book and calendar from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook, or from Microsoft on a PC to Apple’s toolkit. You press a button and it happens. There is a small chunk of software which knows the dictionaries on either side of the exchange, and puts the data into the right place. So it really is not the end of the world if your edit system does not speak the same asset management language as your archive. What needs to be converted can be converted, as it is needed, without delay or inconsistency. This is an every day occurrence in the IT industry. It’s a common companion of service oriented architecture (SOA) software development. It will become the norm in broadcast workflows, too. Workflows are designed around outcomes, and the technology ensures that the right data and the right people meet up at the right time.
You do not want to waste the time of your skilled editors by making them do archive searches: you want them to get on with cutting great spots. So the underlying, service-oriented infrastructure ensures that all the content for the next task is transferred
to a single bin in the editor. There is no need for the edit software to understand much about the asset management system.
At Grass Valley we put asset management technology in everything we do in our editing, news production and server product lines. But it is only to the appropriate level for that particular piece of equipment. Each device knows what it needs to know about the content it handles. Does this mean that to build a large, enterprise-wide system you need a deal of custom-made development? Yes it does. All the really successful systems in operation today - not just those with our equipment - have required substantial custom work, and that will very probably always to be the case. The point is that the customisation, the creation of the service oriented architectures, uses standard IT tools which are proven. That allows organisations to place broadcast workflows in a wider context, ensuring that television assets are managed according to commercial and operational goals. To take just a single example, Major League Baseball in the United States has an enterprise- wide archive management system called Diamond, holding, for example, the complete statistical records since the leagues were founded. Its television facilities use a Grass Valley Aurora production control system which is a plug-in for Diamond, allowing the video archive to be seen as a repository within it. Aurora of course provides highly detailed information on the content within it,
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down to the frame level. It would be nonsense for Diamond to worry about that level of detail, so only what is relevant is shared.
The platform we should be working towards is the service- oriented architecture which sets outcomes as the goal, and which is driven by productive & commercial workflows.
My point is that asset management is not a goal in itself. Attempts to create a shrink wrapped enterprise asset management system have produced a zero billion dollar a year business: plenty of interest but nothing in the way of deliverable products. Its perceived potential depends upon the misconception of a single universal standard. The lack, indeed near impossibility, of such a standard requires each large installation to be a custom project. The platform we should be working towards is the service-oriented architecture which sets outcomes as the goal, and which is driven by productive and commercial workflows. Asset management can then be developed where it really belongs: inside the individual tools, communicating with other asset- aware devices as required, through IT standard interconnections.
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