Especially with the recent shift to remote working, we know there’s pressure on video editors to publish content quickly to meet demand. We also know that between video recording and video consumption lies a long, tedious creative process that relies on efficiently storing, processing, and distributing media files. Media Asset Management (MAM) helps video industry professionals reduce the time spent in storing, processing, and distributing media files – not just processed MP4 files, but also project files, linked footage, images, voice-over tracks, animation, and graphics – so that they can distribute their content quickly to meet public demand.
Media asset management (MAM) describes the workflow and software that helps users store, process, and distribute multimedia files (especially video) throughout the content lifecycle. Most MAM solutions are only optimized to manage video files. However, next-generation solutions like Evolphin Zoom handle every type of rich media file and integrate tightly with key editing tools including – Adobe Premiere, Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve.
A best-practice media asset management system is the single point of truth for rich media content. It gives the content editor secure access to the content and tools necessary to store, process, and distribute rich media content.
For example, to create a ‘simple’, short post-production reel of the highlights of a footballer’s career, you need reliable storage, powerful search and the ability to retrieve relevant pre-production multimedia assets (native footage files, voice-over audio, etc). Not too long ago, you would have met these requirements by creating descriptive file names and categorizing content using folders and sub-folders. To retrieve the files you want, you would search for best-guessed terms – or trawl through hundreds, possibly thousands of folders and files.
Today, Artificial Intelligence(AI)-powered media management systems help editors perform these tasks speedily and more efficiently. With AI, you can automatically tag and then search the multimedia assets you want, and even use AI video editing to create rough cuts. With intelligent plugins for Adobe Premiere for example, the Evolphin Zoom MAM makes it easy to import clips and graphics for faster editing.
A MAM gets you, your post-production workflows, and your content organized.
Media asset management systems (MAMs) are integral to the workflow of efficient multimedia production teams because they simplify the post-production process while easing the flow and efficiency of collaboration among contributors. Apart from being able to store and manage large media files from one reliable, centralized library, MAM systems help media professionals achieve efficiency in several ways, including:
Next-generation, AI-powered MAM systems such as Evolphin Zoom go a step further to offer intuitive features that recognize the audio and video information inside video files including speech for subtitling, language translation, face recognition, and more.
For example, to quickly broadcast soccer highlights compiled from various matches spanning across years, Inter Milan FC relied on the AI-powered media asset management system, Evolphin Zoom.
Inter Milan had a rich database of 21K+ hours of video footage from 113+ years of soccer history. These media assets consumed 600TB of data storage on cloud (AWS S3) and on-premises NAS. In their existing form, these media assets would take months – maybe years – to organize for easy retrieval.
To make these video files easily accessible for the video editors, Evolphin Zoom ingested 21,000 hours of video and used its powerful AI toolset to create clips with AI-generated metadata timelines. With every section of each video clip tagged, organized and searchable, video editors could easily find and import relevant video clips into a range of video editing software – Adobe Premiere, Avid Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve, Apple Final Cut Pro, etc.
Inter Milan’s video editors could then create video sequences inside Adobe Premiere using Zoom’s Premiere plugin and the Zoom AI video editing toolset. Consider this, the time taken to create a retrospective on the 1960s famed left-winger, Mario Corso, was drastically reduced from weeks (or even months!) to minutes. By simply selecting tags like “Face” matches “Mario” and specifying events like “Goal scored”, the Zoom Premiere plugin extracted relevant clips from 21K+ hours of footage into a premade sequence ready for final editing in Adobe Premiere.
By contrast, this same process would have taken months to execute without a MAM system like Evolphin Zoom. It might have looked like this:
Apart from the painfully tedious workflows, staffing costs are highest using this model. Added to this is the protracted length of time taken to publish content, considering the fast-paced nature of the industry. MAM systems offer a practical, intelligent solution for storing, organizing, and retrieving critical media files to help editors work more efficiently.
To switch things up a notch, some MAM systems (like Zoom’s PAM) come with Production Asset Management (PAM) components designed for round-the-clock, work-in-progress media production workflows.. These are built to streamline workflows like film or video post-production.
PAM (Production Asset Management) systems manage work-in-progress workflows and offer a range of benefits. For example, Evolphin Zoom PAM:
As the industry pioneer behind PAM, Evolphin Zoom PAM offers cutting-edge features such as versioning, private workspace tracker, comments/review capabilities, and additional collaboration features.
Zoom PAM also supports diverse workflows with Adobe apps & Cinema 4D plugins, Image Sequence management, traditional DAM use cases with InDesign, Illustrator & Photoshop, as well as 3D tools & 360 AR/VR videos.
Depending on your unique requirements, there are a range of factors to consider when choosing the best media asset management system for your team. Some of the questions you should ask your proposed vendor are listed below:
Here are the steps and estimated timeline involved in purchasing and deploying a MAM:
While the entire process can be challenging, this whole timeline is usually completed within a 2 – 4 month period.
Thanks to COVID and a massive change in attitudes, the remote workflow is here to stay. A MAM is the ideal solution for your new workflow if:
You want to save storage costs by sharing entire projects with freelancers without duplicating folders. MAMs with Smart copy capabilities like Zoom MAM help you optimize your storage with shareable virtual folders that freelancers can work with.
You want to migrate and archive colossal amounts of data without hiring an expensive team or paying a fortune on cloud costs. Storage is expensive, so modern MAMs like Evolphin Zoom use patented technologies like cloud deduplication and a tiered archive management model, to keep cloud costs under control.
DAM (Digital Asset Management) is a common term for any system whose primary purpose is to store published digital files (videos, pics, docs, audio, HTML) and related metadata. While these systems can store multiple file types, they are best suited for smaller files like photos, published videos and documents because larger files, especially native video footage, are usually not easily supported.
Today, DAM systems tend to be more popular in sales and marketing-based environments. When managing larger, richer media & video files, DAM systems usually fall short, with MAM systems becoming more relevant.
While MAM and DAM systems may seem similar on the surface, they are very different beasts! Media Asset Management systems manage a much broader range of digital files, including rich media assets such as massive video and audio footage in a way that DAMs cannot match.
DAM systems most often are cloud-based and are best suited to low volume published content supported by metadata-based search and download capabilities. MAM systems, on the other hand, are best suited for large volumes of rich media assets and unlike their DAM predecessor, can be on-premises or cloud-based also. DAM and MAM systems differ in several ways:
The flexible capacity and higher processing capabilities of MAMs make them ideal for handling complex tasks like transcoding, video collaboration, AI-powered search, final delivery, packaging of rich media content.
Brand Management, finished content
High-res video ingest, transcode proxies
Versioning, Work-in-progress workflows
DAM users include marketing, agencies, freelancers, executives, end-clients
Media managers, producers, archivists, studio operators, videographers
Production users such as editors, media managers
Search, filter, browse folders, download, publish finished assets
Organize, search, transcode, archive high-res media
Check-in Adobe CC projects,, layered files, Motion Graphics image sequence
Markup, Review & Comment
Connect local storage to cloud storage
Full version control, smart link/copy, client-side deduplication
In a nutshell, DAM and MAM systems differ in their functionality, processing capabilities, and the range of media types they can support.
The choice of the most suitable asset management system depends on your workflow. Both systems (DAM and MAM) exist to give you a central repository for your digital assets. However, they differ in their suitability for your unique workflow. MAM systems are purpose-built for handling large media workflows, but DAM systems are built to handle finished or published asset repositories.
With smaller unit files ingested per upload (compared to large volume of massive video files), a DAM system’s resources might be stretched by uploading 100,000 files with Terabytes of storage. On the other hand, a MAM system like Evolphin Zoom will easily accommodate millions of files with Petabytes of storage. So, a DAM system is a general-purpose tool for sales and marketing teams (for example, a media library for a corporate website or social media channel) but a MAM system is a more specialized toolkit for a company that works with larger media assets.
Your choice of a solution depends on what you want. For example, if, like Inter Milan, your organization primarily deals with media assets in a post-production environment, your chosen MAM systems should optimize your team’s workflow in a post-production setting. In this case, your MAM workflow might look something like this:
On the other hand, if your organization primarily deals with creating ‘simple’ graphics and document assets for a marketing or sales team, you are probably best suited for a DAM system. In this case, your DAM workflow might resemble the following:
Essentially, the asset management system you choose depends on your unique work processes and the capabilities of your chosen system to optimize your workflow. Like all new technology, asset management systems constantly adapt and evolve to accommodate new features.
Evolphin Zoom MAM is best suited for highly-specialized teams (like video operations teams, studios, media managers, etc.) with complex, rich media requirements. It boasts of more third-party integrations than any other MAM system (Cinema 4D, Zapier, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.), as well as AI and Machine Learning capabilities to help teams automate post-production tasks.
Evolphin’s DAM is a good fit for generalized teams that need one central hub for all their documents, graphics & finished assets. It offers real-time collaboration via review & markup capabilities, support for a wide range of file types, robust search capabilities, seamless integration, and in-app editing inside third-party applications like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and more.
For evolving teams who want to save costs while organizing their rich content, a solution like Evolphin Zoom MAM is powerful and flexible enough to simultaneously support multiple teams within an organization – marketing, video, graphics, etc. This means that you can consolidate all your team’s needs under one umbrella and avoid the costs and hassles of dealing with multiple different solutions trying to play as one.
Solutions like Evolphin Zoom are flexible enough to incorporate both MAM and DAM systems and to adapt to various business processes and workflow models.
Combined solution that brings your end users, creative teams, marketing, media managers, business owners, external agencies, freelancers under one umbrella
Evolphin Zoom is the only solution that offers plugins for the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Our media asset management plugins cover workflows for Video Editing, Vector Art, Motion Graphics, Layout, Photo, Web Design, and more.
Front-end deduplication: This is a patented feature that is only available in Evolphin Zoom
Downloading media from the cloud can cost over $90/TB. Evolphin Zoom’s front-end deduplication reduces the amount of content stored and the amount of content to be downloaded. How? Only the revision deltas are transferred and not the whole file.
Post-production & creative teams love to clone previous working folders. Duplicating media and digital asset folders takes a ton of storage, increases your cloud costs.
With Evolphin Zoom’s front-end deduplication, folders or files can be copied with 0-Bytes of storage!
Evolphin Zoom’s asset ID-based link management ensures that none of these common scenarios will never throw a project link offline:
If you work with freelancers, you know how painful it is to relink projects shared between your team & freelancers. Our unique “Resolve Link” feature can fix broken links even if the files are missing on the desktop, just by downloading them from our Cloud Media Asset Management service.
Speed up video post-production by letting our AI create sequences from footage saving hours of scrubbing by video editors.
With speech-to-text, face, and object recognition built into the Evolphin Zoom MAM suite, your archives & newly ingested media can be automatically tagged cost-effectively. Make all your images & videos finally discoverable with the ability to search inside a video or find a specific image from millions of assets at the blink of an eye.
No need to get a subscription for another collaboration app to implement reviews & approvals or to share assets with external users.
Our collaboration app supports a range of assets – 2D/3D graphics, images, documents, audio, and video – to allow you to securely collaborate with internal or external teams from anywhere.
With automatic version control and built-in conflict detection, you never lose revisions when multiple editors work on the same asset. Edit your audio or video projects remotely without worrying about teammates overwriting your changes.
Evolphin Zoom Cloud MAM is a turnkey 3-in-1 media asset management solution that supports creative teams as they grow and scale. Unlike competitors’ products, technical setup, consultations, and ongoing technical support come as part of our fully managed AWS Cloud SaaS package – we believe our customers shouldn’t have to hire additional technical staff to enjoy our products.
To better protect your valuable assets, we host each customer as a single tenant without any shared resources, including compute instances, databases, VPC, and firewalls. Compare this with many DAM or MAM solutions that offer only a multi-tenant service with cloud resources shared across customers.
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6101 Bollinger Canyon Road
Suite 324D
San Ramon, CA 94583
USA
Unit No. 1005, 10th Floor
BPTP Park Centra, Sector 30
Gurgaon, HY 122001
India
3rd Floor
86 - 90 Paul Street
London
EC2A 4NE