When is the last time you found yourself asking:
- What media do I have?
- Where do I find it?
- How do I get access to it?
If these questions are becoming more common, then you should consider media management. There have been some great advancements in the media management space that make it possible for anyone with media to organize, protect, and share it with ease.
In this post, I’ll share how new media management solutions like iconik are changing how people work with their large media files.
Growing Media Pains
Photo by Manish Upadhyay on Unsplash
Today, video is a part of every organization, effectively making us all media companies (in a way). We use video to educate, celebrate, promote, and sell.
The immediate challenge of this is moving video files, which can be extremely large. Editors, directors, and stakeholders can spend hours just downloading or uploading videos to share. This inefficiency is compounded if there are bandwidth or hardware limitations.
Another challenge is for the people who have never managed media. They face the difficulty to keep up with growing media archives or to know where to find the right media.
The simplest form of managing files is to create folders and subfolders, name these folders and media files with some naming conventions that are often not known by everyone. And what happens if the files you need are named incorrectly or have been moved to another storage?
It will take more than a simple search in Finder to find mismanaged files.
Let’s be honest, video can be really expensive to create. Losing or duplicating content can be a huge drain on resources, so there should be some measures in place to make media easy to find and use.
This will be key to getting the best ROI on media as archives grow.
Stop Manually Transferring Videos to the Cloud
Use MASV to automatically deliver files to cloud storage
Enter Media Management
Media management is used to manage and distribute large media files, typically time-based assets like video and audio. Traditionally, these solutions are called “MAMs” (media asset management systems). These have been mostly used in the entertainment industry to manage video files. Until recently, these solutions were mostly based on-site and required a lot of hardware and technical knowledge, which is why those traditional solutions also came with price tags that scared most budgets away.
But you’re in luck:
Everything has changed with the recent rise of cloud-native and SaaS media management. What used to only be available to film and TV empires is now available to the smallest creative team with very little start-up costs.
Beyond that, these new technologies are built for the cloud—making them extremely flexible. From the cloud, these new services can offer remote access to media from anywhere, present a holistic view of content from multiple storage locations, and connect to existing storage.
1. Media Management Improves Searchability
Media management will help you get the best ROI on your content by giving it high visibility so it can be discovered, reused, and inspire creatives to make new content.
The standard way to find files is to follow a linear path through folders and subfolders until we find what we need. But with media management, you can search across many different data points with limitless paths to the same file. This metadata has so many uses, but the first win will be less time searching.
Searchable metadata can include:
- Technical data (camera settings, location, creation date, file format,)
- Keyword tags added manually or automatically with visual AI
- Transcriptions (search for spoken words or phrases)
- Who uploaded the content
- Content that is approved, rejected or awaiting review
- Or an unlimited number of custom metadata fields defined by you.
With all this data enriching your media, media management tools can swiftly guide you through 10s of thousands of files.
Want to know what else metadata can do?
2. Media Management Can Automate Media Workflows
Imagine if your media managed itself.
Automating steps in your media workflow could erase hours of manual work every week. With some technical know-how, it’s possible to command media management to take actions based on the metadata of each file.
As metadata triggers the automation, files can be moved to another location, added to a collection, or even sent to a 3rd party service. With these processes, media management solutions can ensure that the right files go where they need to be. Automation removes room for error and saves people a lot of time.
3. Media Management Can Aid Collaboration
Media is meant to be shared. From planning to promoting, people come around media at all stages. It makes sense that the same solution that organizes media should also make it easy to include others in the production process. Today’s media management solutions offer many ways to enable creative collaboration.
Creative Collaboration features available in cloud-based media management solutions today include:
- Secure asset and collection sharing
- User and group roles and permissions
- Time-based comments
- Time-based drawings for video
- Review and approval processes
When Should You Use Media Management?
We’ve covered how cloud-based media management is very accessible, how it super-charges searchability and unlocks creative opportunities.
So how do you know when it’s time to start using a media management solution?
Some of the common reasons for media management adoption include rapid digital growth of organizations and their content, maximizing ROI on existing media, and organizing a lot of media for a short period of time, like for sports events, film festivals, and political campaigns.
If the three wins covered here are something you’d like to experience, then iconik could be what you’re looking for. The idea behind iconik was to make media management for everyone. We’ve made media management intuitive and have eliminated most of the barriers to starting.
If you want to give iconik a try, you can talk with one of our media workflow specialists. They will show you around, and if it feels right, they can set up a free iconik trial.
Send files from MASV to iconik
Delivering media to the right place is the first step to managing media well. MASV was built to send massive media files at the fastest speeds available. To continue managing these files, MASV has built an integration with iconik. This allows users to automatically send files received from MASV to an iconik account.
In this video, we demo how to set up the integration.
What makes this so powerful is that you don’t have to manually download files to your machine and then re-upload them to iconik. This cloud-to-cloud integration happens automatically!
Files can be delivered through the MASV Portal feature. If you have the MASV and iconik integration in place, you can share a Portal link and receive files into your iconik account without any administrative work. This is great for working with freelancers, external production companies, or any other situation you need to receive large media files from multiple sources.
Here, you have a complete solution to transfer and manage media. As your archive grows, this can scale to organize and preserve your media. It will also give more ways to gather people around your media as they create new stories together.
And to move all those massive media files, try MASV for fast, easy, and reliable file transfers with no limits. Sign up today and receive 20 GB towards your next transfer.
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