The Gap Between Creation and Management: Where’s the Bridge?

By Troy Allen Dec 14, 2010

When people think about creating new digital assets, products like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Flash, Avid Media Composer or Sound Forge Pro are the professional’s first choice — depending on the task at hand. Many of these products include a workflow management application which allows users to create projects, share files and apply some level of versioning to the files. Unfortunately however, not all products work together during the creation process.

The Divide Between Asset Creation and Asset Management

Asset elements are often used by many different users in various applications to compose a finished project. Video files are a prime example of this where graphics, copy text, photographs, video files, 3D effects and sound files are created individually in separate applications and then brought together to create a final product.

Corporate videos will usually include files that have been used elsewhere such as in correspondences, websites, print advertisements and internal documentation.

While having the ability to manage files and share assets within a suite of products has improved efficiencies and time to market, there are still gaps when it comes to managing the asset elements and compositions for re-use for future editing.

In the November article on CMSWire, Digital Asset Management - It's More Than Just a Photo Album, I talked about what organizations should be looking for in Digital Asset Management.

DAM, as it stands today, is almost there. Because Digital Asset Management needs to be able to facilitate any media format, it often approaches management from the point of retention and distribution while only giving a slight nod to the creation process.

Creation tools primarily focus on creating the media files, even though they may have some DAM capabilities. As professionals working together within an organization, we need a way to marry the best of both sides of the overall work-stream.

The following is an example of a corporate website which has graphics that have been used for other purposes:

Sena Systems

The same graphics from Sena’s website are also used with other publications such as this example banner:

In both of these examples, the corporate logo came is from a company approved pool of images. The graphic of the two men is from an approved set of backgrounds and two unique fonts — Pirulen and JaneAusten — were used in the banner but not in the website.

3 Ways to Manage Assets

Each of these individual elements can be managed within a traditional DAM system, managed locally by a specific user, managed by a creation product’s utilities or simply saved on the file system. With each of these methods, there are inherent benefits and problems:

Digital Asset Management
Benefits	Cons
Cross Platform Workflow for Approval and editing Revision Control File Locking during Edit Automated Conversions Content Tracking Full Security for editing and access Automated Distribution Rights Management Metadata and Search	Difficult to track elements and what compositions they are used in Little to no direct integrations with editing tools Not all DAM products access digital file EXIF data Conversion capabilities may be limited User Training Required
Creation Product Utilities
Benefits	Cons
Strong integration throughout the product suite Maximizes capabilities of all creation tools Typically Project Driven Project level Security Usually does not require other enterprise applications Product specific work stream tasks File sharing and file tracking Excellent control of EXIF data	File sharing is typically limited to within defined projects Security is specific to projects Typically no or little integration with third-party tools Limited revision Control Limited or no Rights Management Limited or no searching User Training Required
File System
Benefits	Cons
General access by all users Little to no training required Supported by all content creation applications No integration required	No file locking Limited security controls No Workflow controls No revision control No rights management No Metadata Limited search capabilities No automated conversions No content tracking

In an Ideal World, Integration Would be Seamless

A lot still needs to be done in order to bridge the gap between creation and management when it comes to rich media files. An ideal solution would include a DAM product that is designed to integrate with the creation product’s management applications.