Media asset management software anyone?

[cgrant3d]

Do any of you have any experience working with asset management software? I'm particularly interested in your experiences at medium / large firms and what software was used to manage the volume of images that need to be approved for each project.

...

I ask this primarily out of curiosity as I've watched our marketing department try to juggle the hundreds of images generated every month. I work at a large architectural firm and for any given project there may be dozens to hundreds of design/process images, a few dozen iterations of "final" renders and several dozen to a hundred images once the project gets built. Its a ton of data and very difficult to ensure that when a newspaper writes an article or the press needs an image, sometimes there is this last second scramble to find what image has been approved for marketing use, etc... There HAS to be a better way. It seems to me some sort of easy, server based asset manager is along the lines of what we need.

Any ideas? What are your experiences?

Christopher Grant
Visualization Artist, HMC Architects

[schroeder]

Could you not just use Adobe Bridge for something like this? We don't have the same volume as you describe, but Bridge allows us to tag the images with custom metadata (in your case, approved for marketing, etc..). Then, I believe there's a search function based on the metadata.

[trick]

Keep an eye on Flow !!

[Dynedain]

For handling a huge library of images, take a look at Extensis Portfolio.

[crazy homeless guy]

Could you not just use Adobe Bridge for something like this? We don't have the same volume as you describe, but Bridge allows us to tag the images with custom metadata (in your case, approved for marketing, etc..). Then, I believe there's a search function based on the metadata.

horribly slow.

[idesign]

Any one try Vault... from Autodesk and come with MAX?

[schroeder]

I've tried Vault for managing CAD & Civil iterations, but found it cumbersome. Flow looks quite promising!

[DrJan]

I've used Vault for some time, but now I've abandoned it. Like schroeder says it's quite cumbersome and it was kind of a burden for our server.
Now we just use a 2TB Network Storage Device to dump all our Max related stuff on. Only the modellers have access to it and we use our own way of naming files.

I think Autodesk's Vault could be quite nice, but you have to think of a very good way to organize your files before you start using it. We started using it and thought we had a good way, untill we found out that you can't have one texture in more project subfolders. Then we had to re-organize everything again, which took alot of time since Vault doesn't always respond very fast.
Also, it's quite complicated to install everything.

[moshenko]

There was a discusson recently about this on CG Architect:

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/27844-...-software.html

Have a read through that and see if anything helps.

Although, the term "easy, server based asset manager" is a bit of an oxymoron! No software will tell you what a "final" image is, but it will help keep them organized once they are defined as such.