Mark Brown, vp of Rhythm & Hues, and his team developed the Production Tracking System that his growing company uses for its projects.

Let’s face it: We humans are not very good at keeping track of things. We become less good at it as the number of things we need to keep track of and organize increases. Keeping oneself in the loop becomes harder still when things change as they increase in number.

Organizations creating visual experiences for television, game, feature, Internet and other audiences suffer from a similar affliction. Mislaying one’s car keys for a few hours is an inconvenience. Losing track of an element for which you laid out tangible and intangible resources is bad business. Companies that fail to take digital asset management seriously risk paying penalties in terms of reduced team morale, missed deadlines, increased production costs, reduced client goodwill, reduced ability to generate future revenue and a host of other avoidable ills.

Organizations create thousands of digital assets as they generate visual experiences. Digital assets record a project’s journey to its destination. Digital assets embody investment in people, rent, software, hardware, taxes, utilities and other resources required to create that asset. Some consider digital assets instances of an organization’s intellectual property. In visual effects and its sibling fields, digital assets include computer code, scans of concept artwork and storyboards, image elements, image versions, notes, authoring tool setups, textures, plug-ins and so on.

What is Digital Asset Management?
Digital asset management (DAM) systems consist of human and automated systems, processes and methods relating to rapid and reliable recording, annotating, storing and retrieval of an organization’s digital work products during and after production. In game development, for example, DAM systems address productivity tasks such as version control, incident tracking, automated builds and centralizing image and code check-in/check-out.

But a 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: What is it? Where is it? Who is working on it? When is it needed? Who needs to see it? Is it the most current version? Is it approved? What changes need to be made to it? What is its priority? What is its relationship to other work products?

Smart content creation organizations focus on digital assets for the same fundamental reason they keep track of their human and financial assets — because they believe the assets have (or will have) monetary and or creative value to the organization. Each organization has its own criteria for selecting or developing a DAM system: accuracy, ease of use, speed, flexibility, scalability, cost, timeline and so on.

But Google the phrase “digital asset management” and chances are you’ll get links to companies specializing in document management and brand management (logos, packaging art, key art, etc.). Storage, search and retrieval (catalog, library or archive function) are key parts of any DAM system. But what’s unique about DAM for digital production is that assets change extensively as they move through production. In this context, assets become stable and catalogable only at the end of production.

Of course, the point is not just to have organized assets — it’s to do the best work with the resources you have. Even the slickest DAM system won’t make a lousy production into a masterpiece and great projects have been made with rudimentary DAM tools. 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.

George Johnsen of Threshold Digital Research Lab partnered up with IBM to create an in-house DAM system.

Dollars or D.I.Y.
Organizations take a number of factors into account in implementing DAM systems: budget, time to market, team size and skill set, business model, number of simultaneous projects in production, project complexity, company culture and other factors. As with most everything in production, you have two basic choices: buy it or do it yourself. Same goes for DAM systems. Either you pay someone to design, build and maintain your own in-house system or you pay a service provider to do it for you.

Many larger digital production studios operate DAM systems developed in-house and adapted to fit their specific workflow. Mark Brown, vp, technology at Rhythm & Hues (Cat in the Hat, Daredevil, X2 and many other projects) estimates that a show like Scooby Two (currently in production) has upwards of 200,000 assets registered in the company’s Production Tracking System or PTS.

Brown and his team developed PTS over the past several years as Rhythm & Hues grew from a medium- sized to a major effects studio. He credits PTS with helping the company manage projects of increasing size, scope and complexity. He doesn’t foresee a shift to third party solutions for R&H any time soon: “There are great packages out there, but they just can’t do what we can do.”