Jason Perr, of Levels Beyond, is one of the distinguished guests on the panel “Is Production Really Allowed in a DAM?” at our upcoming Conference (February 22-23, 2012). We asked him a few questions to preview this dynamic session.

Createasphere: How did you get into the digital asset management space?

Jason: I’ve worked just about every possible type of position in the film industry. Starting on set as a Production Assistant, moving into Grip, Lighting, Camera work, and eventually into the production office as a production coordinator, line producer, UPM, and then Producing several low-budget projects. I’ve always had a strong tech background, working with computers and video editing on the side since 1995. I’ve used Avid, Final Cut, Premiere, and even cut 16mm negative on flatbeds and sync blocks. After working through all of the various roles of production I transitioned to post-production as a post-production and visual effects coordinator - designing, implementing, and overseeing custom workflows to enable collaboration between editors in Los Angeles, with VFX companies in Korea.

Throughout all of these positions I consistently found massive inefficiencies in the workflows used to transmit and share the media and metadata associated with these various projects. In 2004, I transitioned to focus primarily on post-production technology. I worked with a few different companies to deploy custom workflow solutions to assist in their unique situations. As storage and high-definition cameras became cheaper, and internet content became more valuable and more centralized for monetization, I saw the trend beginning of every company wanting to retain as much of their libraries as possible on accessible storage (i.e. not video tape). While working as an Apple Certified Final Cut Trainer, I was invited by Apple to become one of the first Final Cut Server trainers. When I first saw this software I knew we were on the verge of a paradigm shift. A vast majority of DAM solutions have long been focused on the large enterprise customers with a price tag often starting in the $400k-$500k range. Apple released a product that could do more than many of these systems for a fraction of the cost. (Average price of fully configured and installed system with custom workflows and edit bays included was around $100k). It was at this point that I started to really focus on this industry. Final Cut Server had a short life due to the fact it really never fit into the Apple world of simple end-user applications. But it exposed a new market segment that was growing rapidly. Filled with small to mid-sized companies that often have 10’s or 100’s of thousands of video assets requiring asset management and automation but without the budgets for the larger systems focused on Enterprise price tags.

When Final Cut Server went away, I searched for my next solution to partner with to help users in this segment. After a lot of searching I found Levels Beyond. I am now actively working with Levels Beyond to lead development on the new MediaMine product. We accepted initial beta customers in January, and will do a soft launch at Createasphere’s DAM Conference in L.A. this month.

Createasphere: Why is Digital Asset Management so critical?

Jason: In today’s media economy, people have seen the value of old media re-emerge from obscurity through strongly indexed, searchable databases to lead web-surfers or stock-footage seekers, or many others to find the materials that they are looking for. The creation of these newer searching mechanisms and their ease of use and wide availability have made the importance of having all of your valuable media assets available for consumption at all times an absolute necessity. It’s very hard to monetize content sitting on a tape on a shelf. There is too much manual labor necessary to get to it, causing cost and time issues that make the media less valuable on a sale by sale basis. With the rising size of storage and lowering cost per gigabyte, more and more companies have been moving their entire content libraries onto some mix of on-line, near-line, and LTO tiered storage environment. While this step is critical, it’s not the only one needed to be able to monetize a library. A lot of media that is being repurposed and reused in today’s global video marketplace is often sold (and searched for) in pieces. Content owners need to know (and be able to explain to customers) exactly what pieces of video are contained within any given episode, show, project, etc. This need for the ability to search for media is what makes Digital Asset Management critical.

Having a well thought out DAM isn’t enough anymore though. Being able to find your media and knowing if it’s on Tier 1,2, or 3 storage is nice, but the real need is to be able to quickly cut out that one piece or section that the end user/client is looking for, encode it to their delivery specifications, and deliver it to their location. While many people are still doing all of these processes manually in many of the DAMs out there, automating these processes is one of the most important things to create value for the end users.

The term Digital Asset Management has become clouded with so many companies in this space all managing digital assets in different ways under this same umbrella. The real need is for “Media Mining”. Everyone is familiar with the concept of data mining, (“the goal of data mining is to extract knowledge from a data set in a human-understandable structure” – Wikipedia). Media Mining is similar, it is the process of extracting and cataloging all of the valuable materials from video, audio, and other media elements and making those elements available for rapid delivery to a vast number of clients thought automated encoding and delivery processes. Companies that employ Media Mining systems in their infrastructure are far more efficient than their competitors offering them faster times to market and lower overhead cost of distribution.

Createasphere: What do you see as the biggest challenge(s) in digital asset management?

Jason: One of the greatest challenges in digital asset management is education. Education of the executives to understand why organization and optimization of their media assets is worth the costs associated with doing things right - with the right hardware and the right software without cutting corners that can cause an efficient system to become a problem system.

The next biggest obstacle is the education of the editors and other end users of the systems. Many of these people have been accustomed to their antiquated practices that bring with them many inefficiencies costing their companies time and money. Managers can’t be afraid of enforcing strong policies across their editorial and producer review teams to use the new tools put in place.

Third is the fact that even with the best DAM system, users still need to interact with it to feed in the initial metadata to make the system of any value. While the use of a variety of forms of automated metadata gathering and crowd-sourced metadata gathering is helping ease this pain, most companies that are media-centric in their business really need to be hiring people responsible for wrangling and verifying the integrity of metadata gathered as assets are created.

Createasphere: As a thought leader and contributor to the community, what are some trends that you are seeing which will be positive impacts on DAM and related technologies?

Jason: One of the most important trends is that more and more users are starting to get used to dealing with some form of DAM environment in their everyday workplace. Unfortunately for most of them, the experience has not always been a pleasant one. Many of the largest DAM solution providers have clients that are simply in over their head and bogged down by the complexity of the software in front of them. Many of these systems grew over long periods of time from an origination point in document management to eventually handling video and audio files bringing an increased level of complexity to the app over time as features increased.

The positive impact is that even with a system that might be painful to use at times, users and system managers are seeing the end results of the successful deployments. Seeing improved efficiencies and often starting out with simple automations, they quickly become hungry for more.

Createasphere: How do you use DAM in your personal life?

Jason: Every day I am assisting people with DAM systems, either through integration, customization through writing custom scripts to automate workflows, or working to build the most powerful next generation Media Mining platform.

Createasphere: How do you see DAM looking 10 years from now?

Jason: Ten years from now (if not sooner) I believe we will finally have all of our most valuable assets in the cloud. With cloud storage becoming lower and lower in cost as well as bandwidth charges becoming lower, while tape costs continue to increase, it only makes sense that a vast majority of our media will be sent directly to cloud locations where cloud services enabling the automated encoding, adjustment, and distribution of assets are the primary tools of the trade. The biggest delay in all of these services becoming available for hosting ALL of your media is simply the current high cost of mass media storage and transfer on the web right now. While it may make sense for larger enterprise customers, the smaller customers can’t afford these price tags. This is constantly becoming less and less expensive though.

Createasphere: Why is it important for people to attend Createasphere’s DAM Conference?

Jason: In the world of Digital Asset Management, there are very few places and times where a group of people come together in one place all sharing common interests, pain points and, in some respects, solutions. The Createasphere DAM Conferences are the only conferences that manage to attract the right customers and the right vendors and speakers to push this community forward.

Createasphere: Thank you Jason!

See Jason Perr on the “Is Production Really Allowed in a DAM Environment” panel alongside David Ginsberg (Warner Bros.), Brandon Lippard (Cinematographer), and Stephen Beres (HBO).