Speeding up Video Metadata Ingest for Media Asset Management

Working with a media asset management (MAM) system smoothes out post-production workflows and keeps things organized, but a common bottleneck is associating metadata with content.

Metadata gives useful information about footage, such as date, project, location, and so on. But correctly and quickly tagging footage with the right metadata is often a tedious, manual process requiring dozens of clicks by post-production teams.

When the media team at a major public cloud provider asked CineSys for a better ingestion workflow, CineSys took advantage of the integration and automation features in MASV and Cantemo’s media asset management to dramatically reduce the manual work around tagging video clips with metadata in the MAM.

This workflow was also presented at NAB Show this past April. For a video recap, see below:

In this article, you’ll learn how:

• CineSys developed a workflow to ingest content and associated metadata from contributors into the production workflow as quickly as possible.
• Manual bottlenecks for associating metadata with content within a MAM that slow down production were dramatically reduced.

• The Importance of Metadata in Media Workflows
• How Fast, Efficient Content Ingestion Improves Creative Workflows
• Why Use MASV and Cantemo Together?
• Benefits of the MASV-Cloud Storage-Cantemo Workflow
• MASV-Cloud Storage-Cantemo Workflow Steps
• Simplify Your Media Asset Management Workflow With MASV, Cloud Storage, and Cantemo

The Importance of Metadata in Media Workflows

Juggling hundreds of productions at a time requires correctly tracking each file that each production creates or updates, and that’s typically performed through metadata. Metadata includes information such as location, date, production numbers.

Attaching metadata in formats such as JSON, CSV, or XML to video clips and other content is important for video editors and other post-production pros to keep track of all their contributors and files.

However, the traditional way to gather metadata is by manually checking emails, Slack messages, or other sources. Then someone has to manually re-add that metadata to multiple clips in the MAM system, a process that often involves spreadsheets, sidecar files, and many clicks. In such a manual workflow, mixing up the clips or making other mistakes is a real possibility.

That’s why adding efficient, streamlined metadata collection during content ingestion is key for an efficient media workflow.

How Fast, Efficient Content Ingestion Improves Creative Workflows

Production workflows can often be complex and error-prone. If you’re in the media and entertainment industry, you know what we mean:

• Making sure that the right assets get to the right people when they need it often includes time-consuming manual steps.
• Bottlenecks can crop up at every step, starting with receiving footage all the way to distribution.
• Delays and mistakes cost time and money.

At the same time, metadata attached to uploaded content is often lost when that content is ingested into a MAM.

Automating the process of getting content from contributors into a MAM, and ensuring the right metadata stays attached to every file, can dramatically speed up creative workflows while eliminating the potential for errors.

Why Use MASV, Cloud Storage, and Cantemo Together?

CineSys developed a workflow that takes advantage of MASV’s automation and metadata-gathering capabilities, scalable and secure cloud storage, and Cantemo’s flexible media asset management system.

What is Cantemo?

Cantemo is a hybrid cloud MAM system for remote workflows. It handles metadata, distribution, access control, and content storage. It acts as a content warehouse with fast search and playback, and is easily integrated with third-party archive solutions, NLE’s, transcoders, and distribution engines.

MASVとは？

MASV simplifies and accelerates video and other data-intensive workflows with seamless, high-performance file sharing.

MASV Portal provide a user-friendly way to receive media and other huge files. They’re free to create, so it’s easy to create a Portal for each production or editor on your team. Editors and other contributors drag-and-drop files into the Portal, then fill out a metadata form with the shoot name, shoot ID, location, and so on. A Portal can also be configured to pre-fill metadata for the production.

MASV integrates with a number of cloud storage and media asset management providers. It comes with automated file transfer features that allow hands-free content ingest into cloud storage. It takes just a couple of minutes to set up a MASV Portal to automatically upload files to the cloud.

このワークフローで使用されているMASVの主な機能：

• Portal: Brandable, customizable upload portals for collecting files from contributors.
• Metadata forms: Custom metadata entry forms that allow contributors to easily add metadata to custom fields when uploading. Portal owners can also set rules as to which metadata is required from uploaders, and in which format it should be presented.
• Storage integration: Preconfigured, no-code クラウド統合 that can be connected to a Portal.
• オートメーション: Any Portal can be configured to automatically upload data into cloud or networked on-prem storage, or to specific recipients, via the integrations above.

Benefits of the MASV-Cloud Storage-Cantemo Workflow

The CineSys integration of MASV, cloud storage, and Cantemo streamlined content ingestion for the client and practically eliminated the tedious steps required to manually re-attach metadata to content ingested into a MAM.

Specific benefits of this workflow included:

More efficient metadata tagging

By itself Cantemo doesn’t have enough information to associate footage with metadata—but the production workflow can’t continue until this is done correctly. Here’s where delays and mistakes are most likely to happen: Without this information, a human operator needs to do this manually.

CineSys removed the bottleneck around manual metadata tagging with custom solution in Cantemo that gives the MAM the ability to automatically associate metadata with footage immediately after ingestion. CineSys implemented a Cantemo plugin that uses the 当社のAPI to query package metadata.

This improvement saves clicks and time, and unblocks the rest of the production. All a human operator has to do is confirm the tagging.

使いやすさ

Contributors can upload to MASV Portals with just a browser, with no plugins to install, no caps on package size, no bandwidth throttling, and no MASV sign up necessary (although Portal owners can require uploaders be signed in).

Production staff don’t need IT or security expertise to manage and oversee ingestion. Setting up and tearing down Portals takes just a few clicks. Once set up, the workflow handles ingestion and metadata with minimal manual intervention.

スケーラビリティ

For this workflow, MASV, cloud storage, and Cantemo have practically limitless network and storage capacity. Ingesting even an order of magnitude more footage would have no noticeable impact on performance, reliability, or security.

Improved creativity

With the manual bottleneck all but removed, post teams no longer have to wait for metadata-enriched footage. The payoff is twofold: More efficiency means more and faster productions, and staff can also be assigned to more creative, productive, higher value tasks than manually adding metadata.

MASV-Cloud Storage-Cantemo Workflow Steps

The workflow starts with MASV Portals, uses the public cloud as a central storage point, then employs Cantemo as the media asset manager:

1. Contributors upload footage to MASV Portals. Contributors also fill out a custom metadata form. To simplify workflows for their contributors, the client creates a Portal for each production project.
2. MASV transfers footage and metadata to the cloud. Each Portal automatically transfers uploaded files to a cloud bucket. There’s no complicated configuration needed for this feature: The client only needs to set up the connection between MASV and cloud storage once to use the bucket with as many Portals as they choose.
3. Cantemo auto-ingests media and attached metadata from the cloud. Cantemo automatically ingests the footage and metadata from the cloud bucket, with all metadata retained and matched to the proper files within the MAM.