Apr 19, 2009
Assets management definition
Before we deep into asset management, it’s important to put everyone on the same page and provide a good definition of what is a Digital Assets Management System by defining who uses DAM system & why it’s become more essential than ever in a production environment.
What is Digital Asset Management?
Digital asset management (DAM) systems consist of two aspects; human and automated systems. They are join together to create processes and methods. This is why workgroups needs to relate to rapid and reliable recording, annotating, storing and retrieval of an organization’s digital work products during and after production. In game development,DAM systems address productivity tasks such as version control, incident tracking, automated builds and centralizing image and code check-in/check-out.
DAM system is more than just software or an IT team. A DAM system is anything that helps people in the organization answer fundamental questions about their work products:
1.What is it?
2.Where is it?
3.Who is working on it?
4.When is it needed?
5.Who needs to see it?
6.Is it the most current version?
7.Is it approved?
8.What changes need to be made to it?
9.What is its priority?
10.What is its relationship to other work products?
Asset management in it’s most simple maner is to add meta-data to assets. These assets can be digital or non-digital assets. The current products on the market focuses on digital assets witch includes mainly file tracking system. These assets can be in the form of word, excel, jpeg, 3d file, file sequences, movies, etc.
Goal of DAM system?
The goal of a DAM system is to reduce the risk and cost of rework, enabling people to spend more time creating assets than on finding assets.
In facilities who are running an extensive DAM environment, they usually hire data wranglers to manage the software. The production coordinators are the eyes on the floor, they act as interpreters and detectives, knowing the project well enough to know where an asset really belongs.
Today, more and more people needs to rely on DAM system and not only the artists on the floor, other departments are connecting to the DAM including marketing, publicity, administration & training. This suggests that more and more people in roles allied to digital production. DAM systems can now help organizations communicate across countries and cultures by providing a common project structure and protocols for creating, naming, changing and storing assets.
The production can smoothly run only if producers, coordinators and project managers contributes, understands and improves the DAM systems. The challenge is that assets changes extensively as they move through production. The number can increase dramaticaly during the course, corruption, accidents and lost of data is common in many studios. DAM helps to place the files in context; it how it can become stable and catalogable not only at the end of the production.
Assets types
An art asset, in computer graphics and related fields (particularly video game and visual effects production) is an individual piece of digital media used in the creation of a larger production.
Digital art assets includes:
a) Photographic bitmaps (often used for texture mapping, 3D models)
b) Shaders
c) Motion animation data
d) Stock footage
e) Rendered sequences
f) Sound banks
And many others…
Non-digital art assets includes:
a) Costume
b) Props
c) Picture vehicules
d) Wallpapers
e) Sets
f) Contruction tools
And many others…
Reducing the risk
In conclusion, the goal of a DAM system is to reduce the risk and cost of rework, giving the chance to artists to spend more time creating assets than on finding assets.
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