Part II of my AV Asset Management series compares the evolutionary shift in type of content elements on audio-visual containers that came with the digital evolution.
I once again contend that professional audio-visual asset management was simpler - in the old days of the analog age.
In the analog age, the CONTENT format was the same as the CONTAINER format. Simply put, a BetacamSP videotape has audio-visual content in the BetacamSP video format. Because of this you can put a BetacamSP videotape into a BetacamSP video player and know it will playback successfully.
Conversely, in the digital age the CONTENT format is frequently NOT the same as the CONTAINER format. Take hard drives for instance. When holding a physical hard drive (container) in your hand, do you intrinsically know what is on it? Simply put, no. Not knowing what is on it is just part of the battle though. Even when you know the content, accessing it is complex as well.
The solution to accessing content on a hard drive may seem simple... just connect it to a computer. No so. Hard drives may hold audio, video, correspondence, financial, or any number of other content types. To muddy the waters even further, each of those content types may be in a dozen different file formats. For example, a digital video file could be in Flash, Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, or other formats. Going even deeper, a Quicktime video file may use the animation codec, which is one of more than a dozen different codecs (compressor/decompressor algorithms) used with the Quicktime format. And if that were not enough, each of those codecs has dozens of settings. To recap, our digital video example has at least four layers (Type=video >> Format=Quicktime >> Codec=animation >> Settings=too many to list) of complexity.
It is the above level of complexity that makes professional audio-visual asset management far more challenging in the digital age.
In my next post I will address another challenge introduced by the dawn of the digital age... the sheer quantity of content elements that can be put on a single physical container.
