In No Particular Order

Whuddup Peoples!!

I’m sitting in my hotel room pounding coffee at about 4 in the afternoon. I just came up from the final session at the Henry Stewart – Digital Asset Management Conference here at the Hilton in New York. While the caffeine is coursing through my veins, I thought I’d put some thoughts down on the highlights of the show while they are fresh in my mind. So here goes…

Steve D. is a LEGEND! This guy’s mug is all over the Xinet booth. He and TMS are featured in this month’s Xinet newsletter. Check it

For those who dont know, Xinet is the software behind checkout. Adam (from Xinet) ran thru the new features that are scheduled to release by the end of the summer…then we went out for Sushi and xtra large Sapporo’s with the boys from NAPC- Nice! Some of the features include more advanced video support with custom transcoding, on-the-fly reel creation, and more codec support. They’ve also added online mark-up and annotation tools.

I spoke at a session this morning titled: “How a Brand Delivery Agency Manages and Executes a 21st Century Global Packaging Assignment for McDonald’s” The good news is: I managed to not balls it up. There were probably about 50 people in the room and I got some great questions and complements after the preso, so I think people enjoyed it. Side note about my preso- the moderator for the preso was Andrew Salop- who founded the XMP initiative when he worked at Adobe. Baller status.

The 2 best sessions (in my mind) were both today. The first was a round table that included the DAM specialist at Digitas in New York. He had some great insights into metadata tagging in an Agency workflow. I’ll be borrowing some of his ideas :)

The BEST session- hands down- was with Paul Nicholson, VP of Print and Video Production at The Red Group- the in-house studio for Showtime Networks. If I’ve ever discussed DAM with anyone reading this, the chances are pretty good that I brought this guy up in our conversation. I’m enamored with his DAM setup and have been for a few years. It’s sooooo well planned….He’s a master of implementing technologies and having them all work together seamlessly. Lots of custom development too. Anyways, I asked a few quetsions during the preso and we had a chance to chat afterward. He is the man.

The guys from Versus and FoxNews Channel also had some very impressive DAM systems to present. Both have moved away from tape all together and are broadcasting and archiving strictly in digital. The most impressive parts about these systems, particularly with Versus, is the sheer size of storage space on their servers. They claim their HD footage takes up almost 1 Gig per minute!!!

Media Beacon probably had the busiest booth as they just announced version 3.0 of their system. It’s very slick. They have moved to a widget based interface- similar to iGoogle. Think of DAM as a customizable dashboard.

That’s all for now- if anyone cares to “dork-out” any further on the subject of DAM, give me a shout. rob.tarpey@tmsw.com

Later

Rob