For Andrea Kalas, installing a media asset management (MAM) system just made sense. Kalas, director of the Virtual Studio at Discovery Communications (DCI), assembles and supplies the materials and production services to the Discovery Channel, Discovery Online, and a number of other divisions of the Bethesda, Maryland-based company.

“Before [adopting a MAM] people ran around looking for videotapes all around the company, trying to find the footage that they needed,” says Kalas. “It was a broken system that needed to be fixed.”

So more than 18 months ago Kalas, Peter McKelvy, senior vice president, content management, and their team set out to choose and deploy a MAM capable of tackling DCI's far-flung operations and unmovable deadlines.

The team at DCI wasn't totally new to the concept. In 1996, DCI became one of the first users of Cinebase for its archiving capabilities.

Its choice this time around? Convera's Screening Room. The software follows today's MAM model of integrating everything from logging through editing and “publishing” (posting to Web sites) into a single point-and-click interface.

(Convera formed in December 2000 with the combination of Vienna, Virginia-based Excalibur Technologies and Intel's Interactive Media Services division. The client roster also includes Sony, the NBA's online venture, ABC News, RealNetworks, and Warner Bros.)

Screening Room made its pilot run at DCI during the production of a Watch With the World special on the international space station that aired this past December. Postproduction entailed culling 80 hours of video for the one-hour show, an elaborate Web site presentation, foreign versions, trailers, and more.

Along with director Pierre de Lespinois at his Los Angeles-based Evergreen Films, two DCI production team members input metadata during digitization onto a Windows NT server. Meanwhile, writers and producers at the Bethesda headquarters tapped into Screening Room via a Web-based VPN (virtual private network).

The production team quickly saw benefits. “That [arrangement] became an incredibly valuable production tool,” says Kalas. “We found that the writer used [Screening Room's search tools] to find the best interview quotes very quickly and easily.”

McKelvy concurs, “It was a much more effective way to create access to the assets and allow the core production team to focus their energies and efforts on the production.”

But, McKelvy adds, it's only by entering amounts of metadata during ingest and logging that MAM users reap the most value. “The real key here is to capture that information when it's created,” says McKelvy, “as opposed to going back and trying to reassociate that descriptive information to your archive after the fact.”

Asset management systems offer increased control over a project, but that power needs to be carefully directed. On a cautionary note, Kalas warns about applying a MAM system indiscriminately. Upon getting a MAM system, she says, “some people have this great idea, ‘Let's digitize all our video and make it available to everybody.’

“But is anyone ever going to use that stuff? What we found was that the video people need access to the stuff that's going on right now, not something from the past. Our international team really needs access [to current project material]; they need to make a version now since they face a very strict deadline.”

But to meet those production deadlines, just how well does the current crop of MAM systems integrate with NLEs? “I have a message for all of the asset management companies out there — please integrate, and we will buy your product!” says Kalas. While Kalas does credit Convera for its progress in exporting EDLs and recognizing continuous timecode, she wants a system that can move the actual video back and forth to the NLE.

Yet Kalas finds Screening Room solves DCI's production needs. “It's no longer a single production anymore. For lack of a better term, it's crossplatform exploitation that goes on — advertising promotions, broadband, theatrical trailers, and home video. It's solving how to give access to 50 people to the same thing at the same time that's really been the big payoff for us.”

A virtual private network (VPN) exists within an open, public network. VPNs have the security of a private network via access control and encryption, but take advantage of the economies of scale and management capabilities of large public networks.