New Sans Digital Video Assets Management

Sans Digital has released a line of video asset management designed to extend the archiving and management needs of video production workflows.

The Sans Digital Video Assets Management (SD VAM) manages a multi-tiered storage environment to deliver an affordable retention and archiving system, built upon Sans Digital’s NAS.

The digital video productions associated with broadcast media and entertainment industry, presents an exceptional set of management and data storage challenges. Up until now, video production companies have regarded video assets management from a storage destination perspective, and IT managers have responded to needs of computer graphic artists, animators, illustrators, and video editing teams merely by supplying NAS/SAN devices. The need for an over-arching video asset management is now available to simplify the post video production process.

Sans Digital VAM was designed to support video content management for production video workflows. It manages video data and tracks all of its metadata and associated files. It recognizes and supports data from today’s video editing solutions including Final Cut Pro, Avid, and others. Once video file assets are ingested and cataloged into the Information Repository, user-configurable policies then migrate and replicate the video assets to less-costly secondary storage, generating a return on investment of storage resources.

Most video files today contain extractable context as well as content file-specific metadata that can be used to identify a particular file or group of files. Video and entertainment industries today have evolved its own set of additional context metadata, such as shoot and edit dates, closed caption information, etc., and VAM incorporates that metadata in the post-production process to allow for the search and retrieval of needed assets.

As video data is ingested, Sans VAM creates thumbnail representations from frames within the video as well as a low-resolution ‘proxy’ version of each file. A click on a thumbnail launches the low-resolution proxy file in the Sans Digital Media Player, making it easy to determine whether the correct file has been located as well as the desired sequence within a file. The built-in Media Player enables the user to view files at variable speeds, search metadata content, navigate to a particular point in a file, and clip particular parts of files for export even if the video files have already been moved off-line. Once identified, requested video files are exported into the Export Queue. If data is needed for further production processing, for example, it can be retrieved to any network location.

"The need for managing digital video content has passed the capabilities of software and hardware products that are designed to provide archiving and backup. Sans Digital’s VAM is the complete video asset management solution that provides innovation in the areas of data protection, maintenance, and lifecycle management for all types of computer data," stated by Stanley Chan, director of business development of Sans Digital.