Multimedia Metadata & Data Formats

By Jonathan Morgan

Oh how we are swayed to tread the futile tides of time …

• First: Everything was structured (read; directory, file structure)
• Second: Everything was unstructured (read: Yahoo! Search)
• Third: Everything was tagged (read: social bookmarking)
• Now: Everything in media asset management can be found by MXF, XMP… labels?

I wish! Standards are adhered to somewhat sporadically. Great when they are, but what if they are not? Fact is that a lot of data is stored that will never be useful, because the cost of finding the data back again is just too high.

Should I Archive Data in Project Files?

No single one of the above strategies is ever going to work in isolation, for example:

• If we work daily within project folders chances are that we are going to store our data within an archive, within project folders.
• But then, five years down the line… project folder definitions have been changed far beyond what we now know and the question comes up
• Did I store that photo album as “weddings/Barcelona” or was it stored under “Barcelona/weddings”?

Still. If you work in project folders – archiving data in project folders is going to help you to find that data back in the short-medium term.

When Should I Tag?

Tagging is essential. Jim Mellor makes a great comment when talking about AMV:BBDO – it would be really useful if we can answer questions such as:

“can we have the banner of the Sainsbury’s ad”

AMV:BBDO start tagging during the ingest phase so that those tags are present throughout the clip’s life, using Proximity Artbox (soon to be Final Cut Server).

We would argue that the archive should support supplying and searching on those tags as well as the media asset manager (i.e.Final Cut Server) so that should it ever get replaced, the metadata is still there.

One thing here is that over the years data tagging standards (internally to the organisation and in the wider community will change) being able to re-interpret data is essential.

Key Observations

• Storing projects in folder structures is USEFUL for archiving
• BUT Metadata tagging is ESSENTIAL if you want to reuse data properly
• It’s never too early in the process to start metadata tagging
• Metadata tags should be kept in the files themselves – NEVER just in a proprietary database – that database will not be around in a few years time
• Archives will be re-interpreted from time to time to extract new metadata information

Warnings

Apart from avoiding keeping your metadata in a proprietary database, a word of warning about some online archiving solutions, SaaS, and/or tape solutions. Such solutions might inhibit re-examination of data manually and/or to automatically extract new information (such as searching through an archive with face recognition software). The future will include, e.g., re-examining data with automated speech, facial, or object recognition to automatically generate new metadata databases. It will also include changes in how you want to index your digital archive. Chose a solution that allows you to do those things.

External References

Jim Mellor AMV:BBDO: http://www.object-matrix.com/jimmellor.html
XMP Adobe: http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp/index.html
MXF Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MXF

Our Advice?

Data archived is only an asset if it can be found again.

There’s no point in keeping data hidden where no-one can find it. Metadata it, store it in an open format, keep it available on your network and searchable.

Next…

Next time out I’d like to take a quick view on total cost of ownership (TCO).