Alienbrain versions, tracks and stores assets throughout production. © Avid Technologies.

Once upon a time, all the various digital assets used for a project were created from scratch, used once and then thrown away. Keeping track of them involved walking through your production studio and yelling out, "Hey, where's the …..?" Somebody usually knew, because there weren't that many things flying around, and there were only so many rooms in the building that those things could be hiding in.

Fast forward to the present day. With the cost of features at more than $100 million and videogames at more than $4 million for PS2 and Xbox, producers have become risk-adverse, with the result that more and more productions are not first-time efforts, but sequels (a la Matrix 1,2,3, Harry Potter 1,2,3 and on and on) — which require the faithful reproduction of the models and vfx from previous versions. The number of assets has grown astronomically — not only are there many more models, scenes and movements, but they come in different versions, used for different purposes. A high-resolution version of a model, for instance, won't work on a Website or a game application. The number of applications has gone up — an asset that once had a single purpose in life now may be used for previsualization, preproduction, set design, production and vfx, one or more games based on the show, as a model for creating merchandise and for one or more sequels and spinoffs. Furthermore, the cost of creating the asset has gone up — for instance, a model of an animal nowadays likely has much higher resolution, finer surface textures, subsurface bones and musculature; all this raises the price of losing it and having to recreate it. Finally, there is no "the studio" any more to search through — the project may be spread over several continents, with half a dozen companies involved in approval cycles.

A good digital asset management system is essential on epics such as Troy, where hundreds of vfx shots must be easily accessible at any moment. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Ent. © 2004 Warner Bros. Ent. All rights reserved.

"Collaboration" has become a magic word in digital content creation (DCC) lately, fueled by the Internet — collaboration between different types of artists, between teams, between culturally diverse corporations. A major production such as Lara Croft or Troy may be produced by dozens of medium and small studios and teams collaborating together. But the dirty secret is that collaboration brings its own spate of problems — how do you keep all those different people working in synch, on complex projects where it's really easy to lose track of "what-version-of-the-dinosaur-are-we-working-on?" How do you keep all of this from spinning out of control?

Enter Alienbrain Studio from Avid Technologies (www.alienbrain.com, recently acquired by Avid). This is probably the most popular digital asset management (DAM) system for small-to-medium sized workforces (up to a few hundred people) around, with "out-of-the-box" simplicity of use. It versions, tracks and stores assets such as 2D and 3D graphics, audio and video files, html files, source code, office documents and custom or proprietary formats. And because they've been around for seven years, the good people at Alienbrain have gotten a lot of feedback from a user community that includes digerati such as Siemens, Sony, Electronic Arts and Atari, which has been incorporated into several upgrades, the most recent of which is Version 7

Studio is more than just a traditional asset management library that archives and retrieves resources (that's only part of it). Rather, it's a framework that manages assets throughout the development process, for designers and artists, project managers and programmers, in a secure central repository. All historical versions of each file are maintained, so the user can always get back to a previous state (to avoid those "whoops" moments).