MerlinOne Digital Asset Management Blog

Video Asset Management to Maintain Raw Video Source

As a video editor, you learn very quickly that a lot of the heavy lifting in the editing process happens before you even start cutting video. That heavy lifting is the organization of your media. Keeping track of every shot from every tape can be quite daunting, especially when working with many hours of raw source. It is in this organization or capturing stage that an editor begins building the metadata for his or her video assets.

In the early days of editing on a nonlinear edit system (NLE), the captured analog video collected very little metadata. There was nothing on the tape to tell the edit system where the camera started and stopped other than visual cues. Editors who liked to stay on top of their media management would follow one of two methods:

1. The editor would either digitize an entire tape as a single clip and then they would go through that large clip and break it into its individual clips. The advantage of this method was it was a lot easier to find the scene changes in an NLE than it was to shuttle through the actual tape.
2. The other more "proactive” method would be to go through the entire tape and log it before the digitizing process even began. This method could be more efficient in that the editor would "get to know" the source early in the process and then could be more selective in what actually gets digitized into the system. In the days when a 3GB drive could cost you well over a couple of thousand dollars, this method ensured you didn’t run out of storage space prematurely.

Things are easier these days with the advent of digital video and the much lower cost of storage. Digital videotape enables auto scene detection, where the NLE recognizes where the camera starts and stops and then breaks the video clip based on those camera starts. Tapeless cameras are file-based acquisition - each shot is saved as a separate file. Although a tapeless camera can be the most convenient way to acquire footage, it can be a bit scary to seasoned editors who know that sometimes media can become corrupt. Without the comfort of a tape on the shelf ready for re-capturing, the chance of losing raw video source forever increases dramatically.

More and more, editors are depending on a way to store and retrieve the full-resolution video source clips. That’s where a digital asset management or, in this case, a video asset management system comes into play. In addition to the metadata automatically captured about the source (source or tape name, start time, end time and any other comments entered about the clip), editors can now enter additional information about the clip or project to make it all the more easy to find that clip at a later date.

With file-based video systems, there are no longer rooms with shelves full of videotapes. Instead the source video now lives on a server with all the redundancies and fault tolerance that a server-based system offers. Video asset management systems simplify the whole process of finding a clip. No longer does an editor or his/her assistant have to walk to the storage facility, find the particular tape and then shuttle through it to find the needed shot. Instead, the video asset management system can be accessed from anywhere and the clips can be previewed from any computer connected to the system.

Video asset management systems not only provide the tools for finding valuable video assets, but they provide an easy and safe way to back up video files. As videotape slowly becomes a thing of the past, editors will soon remember affectionately how clunky and slow it was to find what they needed from tape - much the same way older film editors remember the feel of film in their hands and the many cuts on their fingers.

Posted by James Burke

Logical e-Discovery Workflow

I recently put the finishing touches on our user’s manual for the MerlinOne Integrated e-Discovery System. Writing a manual for a software application (this one is 30 pages long) is an interesting endeavor because you might imagine that if software is designed well (ours is) no manual should be required.

We always refer back to the original premise for Macintosh software, way back in the day, where a successful application was supposed to be intuitive enough that a novice user could sit down and get their job done, and yet deep enough so that an expert user would still be satisfied.

For users who encounter it for the first time, or for those that do not want to EVER read a manual (insert male gene joke of your choice here) our application’s screen is designed to follow the well-defined Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM), meaning every important phase (Processing, Review, Analysis, Production) has its own tabs. We made sure it is laid out in a logical manner, all of the buttons and links use tool tips to further enhance their labels, and you work from left to right and top to bottom.

But, there will always be people that want to read a manual (you know who you are), and of course a manual is required reading when you want to dig below the surface to uncover the rich features in the application. Really handy but under-utilized Boolean search operators come to mind: they are cool and useful but  undiscovered, even though they are well described in our documents.

For me, writing a manual is a great way to learn everything there is to know about our products. I like to joke I am the perfect person to write documentation like this, because I am the least likely to understand the developers lingo.  I take nothing for granted.  If I do not completely understand the intent of a button or process, I go back to our product manager and developers for repeated explanations.  If I don’t get it, it does not get into our documentation (and usually I suggest the feature get re-thought!).

When I wrote my first piece of documentation, designed to cover an upgrade to Merlin Picture Desk®, it was designed as a printed piece. Later, our documentation standard became PDF. As part of our effort to document our latest e-discovery product and make it easier for our users going forward, we will be doing short video clips that explain how to do certain tasks.  These will be accessible over the web, and I am writing the scripts for these as well.

I have been told, though I have been the on-camera “star” of some of our previous video productions, I will not be doing the voice-over for these video tutorials.  I guess my distinct, unique (when I answer infrequent telemarketing calls, they refer to me as Ma’am) voice was not destined for fame. But my words will live on!

Posted by David Breslauer

Digital Asset Management and the FIFA World Cup

Suddenly everyone I know is a football fan. No, not the kind of football game with guys all padded up to play on Saturday or Sunday (I live in the South where those football fans have always existed). This is the kind we Americans refer to as soccer. By-the-way, I did read an article that the word “soccer” really came from the Brits, who apparently scorn the US for calling it that today. Life is hard when the rules keep changing….

Of course the American team making it past the first round of the 2010 World Cup probably prompted the sudden popularity. Although ironically around here in the US South hundreds, perhaps thousands, of kids play soccer, my son included. He just made the travel team- meaning I get to travel a hundred miles to Jacksonville, Fl., every other Saturday this Fall. But previously we rarely watched soccer on television or saw any pictures in our local newspaper.

For the last couple weeks restaurants and bars have been advertising their big screen televisions and food and drink specials for the World Cup tournament game days, just like what they do for our college and professional football game days in the Fall.

The interest in the FIFA World Cup is of course huge in the rest of the world. It takes place every four years and rotates locations around the world. The 2010 tournament is being placed in South Africa. The 2014 FIFA World Cup is expected to be played in Brazil.

The spike in interest here in the US and around the world impacts our digital asset management system since many of the larger newspapers use our system to manage photographs-those generated by their staffs and those that come from the wire services. USA TODAY, one of our customers, has reported more than 3000 “football” pictures being sent from wire services on game days. The usual TOTAL number of pictures they get per day from all stories around the world runs between 7000 and 8000. That’s a lot of pictures of guys playing soccer (err, “football”). But wait…

De Telegraaf in The Netherlands uses a Merlin Digital Asset Management System to manage their photos, along with their stories and PDF pages for several of their publications throughout the country. Since The Netherlands team played and beat Uruguay in the semi-final match and made it to the finals against Spain, interest is enormous for their readers. They have a large Merlin system and typically ingest around 70,000 pictures per day. On the day of the semi-final game they put in 17,000 more pictures just from the World Cup, or an average of one soccer (sorry, “football”) picture every 5 seconds, for 24 hours a day (in reality they probably were seeing a few new soccer pictures each second during the games, and hopefully some quiet during the overnight periods!).

With Merlin’s modular expansion, our support team was able to help De Telegraaf configure their system to process and index (so that the captions and metadata are searchable) this overflow amount. They distributed the various wire service and local photographers’ flows across a couple servers running our input processing tool. Editors were able to monitor all incoming pictures in one screen, or they could have multiple screens, each with pictures from a different game, all updating dynamically non stop. I can only imagine 30-45 new pictures to look at every minute during and right after game time!

Not to date myself, but when I started in photojournalism in the 80’s the most prolific source of photos, the Associated Press, delivered one photo every 10 minutes, or a maximum of 144 transmissions per day (and about 15 of those were things like weather maps and charts). Now de Telegraaf’s Merlin is receiving and presenting that many in just over a minute!

I did watch the final game Sunday and I was cheering for the orange-The Netherlands team-because I do have friends there. The only good thing was the little guy on Spain’s team scored the winning goal and that made my son (who is on the small side) happy and gave him confidence for his upcoming season.

Posted by Rande Simpson
Photo www.landov.com

Cool New iPad App from Our Digital Asset Management Customer

I am a Mac user and an Apple fan and have been for years. I am on my second iPhone and as a matter-of-fact, my husband and 12-year-old daughter have them and my 10-year-old son uses my first generation iPhone (no phone service though - I do have to draw the line somewhere) as an iPod touch, downloading as many cool, mostly game apps he can find.

Speaking of cool apps, one of our Merlin Picture Desk System and DAM users, the New York Post has a new app for the iPad. No, I don’t have one of those yet. But I want one.

The iPad is a handheld device made by Apple that has been called an iPhone on steroids. It has a 9.7 inch high-resolution screen that makes watching movies, viewing photos or surfing the web amazing. If you don’t like the touch screen keyboard,  you can attach an external keyboard dock or use a bluetooth one. You can download photos from your digital camera directly to the iPad. You can hook up a set of speakers and jam out. You can hook it up to a projector for presentations. And it is extremely portable.

The New York Post app gives you a twice-daily dose of terrific photos, including celebrity, sports and news pictures. I am a news photo junkie so this is just perfect for me. My daughter is a celebrity watcher, so she would enjoy seeing what all her favorite actors and performers are doing daily.  There is a plan is to eventually deliver the entire newspaper to iPad users-for those that like to read the stories too!

The New York Post, a tabloid that has a daily circulation of 724,748,  has been using our Merlin Digital Asset Management and Picture Desk System to manage their photographs since 1996.  Photo editors select pictures from their Merlin two times a day, adding them to a project or folder. Once the edits are final they drag and drop them to an output target so a Post Pix staffer can upload them to the iPad app.

The iPad app gives people a way to share the cool NY Post pictures with their friends. You get to keep 5 days worth a photos and the app includes the software so you can view them in a slide show. Plus you can email the really good ones to your friends that don’t have an iPad, or you can post them on your Facebook page.

The reviews on the iTunes site for the New York Post app are terrific. People just love it. Who knows with more cool apps coming out everyday, I might just have to buy an iPad.

Posted by Rande Simpson
Photo by Rego - twitter.com/w3bdesign

Electronic Discovery Trade Show - Impressions from the Road

I never really thought about it, but I guess I now have to consider myself a trade show veteran. I have been attending trade shows related to my work since 1991. I just spent two days at LegalTech West in Los Angeles, where my company, MerlinOne, showed the second generation of our integrated e-discovery suite.

Trade shows are a place where companies show their products and introduce their cutting edge technologies. Companies use a variety of methods to convince people to stop by their booths, listen to their pitch and hopefully leave contact information for follow-up. One time honored method for getting booth traffic is the give-away. A give-away can range from pens, pads and colorful bouncy balls (so you don’t have to remember to stop and get something for the kids before returning home) to more expensive items that are given away lottery style in exchange for leaving a business card with that oh so important contact information.

You can tell a lot about up and coming technology and popular culture by what the give-aways are. This year, one company at LegalTech gave away a foosball table. I expect this has to do with the FIFA World Cup being played in South Africa. If the USA can continue to hang in there, the interest in soccer may stick around for more than a few moments. I wonder how I would have gotten that foosball table home in my carry-on, not to mention where I would put it once I got it home.

The other big give away this year, from many different companies, is much more transportable, an iPad. Not sure what that has to do with the product being sold, but still an interesting “I want to have one” item. One vendor gave away a significant gift card to the Apple store. Almost like getting an iPad, but not quite.

Of course food is always a good give-way, I saw cookies, chocolates and even a PEZ dispenser with PEZ candy. I am not sure where the leftover PEZ dispensers went, but there were plenty of PEZ candies around near the end of the day.

So, you might be wondering, with all the give-aways, what did MerlinOne give away. Well, we had some pens with our logo, and some small notepads. Always useful items. I never have a pen when I need one. When I got back to the hotel, I found a MerlinOne pen in every pocket of my jacket. I will still probably be pen-less one day soon.

We also gave away samples of our product. I think we were probably the only company that gave away samples of our product. Through the end of LegalTech West, we offered some of the visitors to our booth the opportunity to put up a case (real or test) on our hosted SaaS environment at no charge. A chance to kick the tires in a real-life e-discovery EDRM environment.

Want to learn more about MerlinOne’s e-discovery system, visit www.merlinone.com or call one of our experts. We are happy to help.

Posted by David Breslauer
LA Skyline Photo by RodneyRamsey

MerlinOne Integrated e-Discovery System At LegalTech West 2010

MerlinOne will be showing some exciting new tools while exhibiting at the LegalTech® West 2010 trade show, to be held at the Los Angeles Convention Center on June 23-24.

LegalTech® provides an in-depth look at what the technology world has for the legal industry to improve their practice management. The expansive exhibit floor offers the most extensive gathering of innovative products designed to meet technology needs.

More than 100 vendors will be at the two-day exposition showing the latest in legal management tools, resources, and services.

We will be demonstrating our legal processing, review and analysis tool that maps closely to the EDRM (www.edrm.net) industry standard workflow. We will also be showing how the MerlinOne electronic document discovery system makes audio and video files searchable with email, docs and graphics.

We will show legal professionals how our low, flat fee e-discovery pricing (that ends per-gigabyte pricing and users fees) can help their law firms save money in this challenging economy.

If you will be at the conference please come visit us at booth 329, we would welcome the opportunity to show you our integrated e-discovery system and to chat with you about challenges you are facing with the tools you are currently using.

Posted by Rande Simpson

MerlinOne Integrated e-Discovery System V2.0 Launch

Back in March I wrote a blog that talked about our deep technology background in managing large, important collections of digital assets (isn’t that what e-Discovery is?), about how our strengths include optimizing workflows for overtasked or cost-conscious organizations, and listening closely to what people need. I concluded:

“So what are we doing in the legal market? Bringing you a rapidly evolving, fault-tolerant, well supported product, with advanced tools and abilities, at game changing prices, from a vendor with decades of expertise.”

Big promises - typical vendor language. At best you decide to wait and see if anything of substance comes from it, worst case is you dismiss the company as just another marketing-driven hot air exercise.

Well, we’ve been very busy listening and developing, and we are delivering the next step in the rapid evolution of our product at LegalTech West in a few weeks: MerlinOne Integrated e-Discovery System V2.0.

Here’s its story:
From the time we entered the e-Discovery market everyone really liked that we integrated Processing, Review, Analysis and Production into a single workflow with disruptively low pricing. No more expense and time lost due to moving bulk quantities of data from one application that does one task, to another application that does another, and fretting about the possibility of data loss in the process. Our couple of decades of experience in dealing with digital asset management gave us a large body of code and workflow to leverage off for our initial legal release.

We were lucky to have some great launch customers, and we listened to them, and what we heard was that we were missing some important steps to be truly integrated, and to truly be a great value we needed to add those into our system. So one goal for version 2.0 was to knock off the checkbox “plumbing” functions that the legal industry gets “nickel-and-dimed” over, like integrating OCR, TIFF on output, support for Concordance, Summation and CaseMap integration. Because for 20 years our products have always been focused on what is now called “native” file support, the TIFF conversion felt like a step backwards to us, but we now understand the need to export to older generation legacy applications still in wide use. At the same time we are automatically ready for the future of an all-native workflow.

Another goal was to restructure the application into intuitive, mission-specific tabs that directly map to the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (“EDRM” at www.edrm.net) workflow. We wanted to accomplish two things:

To make it clear and obvious for even a novice user to find a specific feature they need to use. Since the EDRM is what is used to clarify to practitioners how e-Discovery works, why not map the application to conform to it? We are all about intuitive, natural user interfaces.

To deliver optimized, easy-to-isolate tools for each step of the workflow. As an example, the screen a reviewer sees should only include high-speed tagging tools, so they can do their job quickly and efficiently, and they should not have access to information beyond their task. So for a review-only log-in, we present just access to the Review tab, and the objects listed are only those documents that specific reviewer needs to work on. Clean, simple and fast!

Finally, we wanted to dial in some advanced features that came up in our “listening” sessions, where we routinely ask “What are the three things you have to do that you hate the most?”. Just a few examples of what came out of that are a bookmark for reviewers: if they do some work, log off, and then log back in the next day, one mouse click brings them to the next record they need to review. In the Processing phase, we were told of law firms sometimes getting a thousand-page PDF that actually contains 30 or more documents all scanned and PDF’d together: so we built a “Reunitization tool” to make it easy to break out the separate documents. How cool is that (the tool, not the name)?

We have a long, and growing list of innovations we think will save time and money, and result in better work, and we have just scratched the surface. We gave high priority to robust “plumbing” for version 2.0, and now we are raring to get into the clever fun stuff. We are just getting started!

So if you get a chance, invest a few minutes in checking out our MerlinOne Integrated e-Discovery System version 2.0 at LegalTech (booth # 329) or call us for a demo, and see if we are all about “hot air”, or solid, smart innovation!

Posted by David Tenenbaum

Open Source DAM vs. Commodity Digital Asset Management Pricing

There is always discussion on various chat groups about saving money by using Open Source code for building your own digital asset management (DAM) system. There was a time when IT departments were better staffed and funds for development projects were not limited – during this time, this made sense.

But today with DAM systems - especially a hosted DAM solution - at very low,  almost commodity pricing, it does not make sense to build your own. Granted I work for a company that that has been in the digital asset management space for over 20 years, so my opinion might be a bit slanted.

With a home-grown system usually the IT person who built it, supports it. In previous times, people spent their entire careers at a single company, but that is more the exception these days. So when the developer leaves, what happens to the DAM support? Either someone else needs to learn it, if there is good documentation, or worse case, reverse-engineer it.  I know this because we have been called in to help reverse engineer a system or two so that we could extract the metadata along with the data.

We’ve also found the person who “inherits” the system is less enthusiastic about answering trouble calls at 3 AM than its inventor may have been. What about 24x7 support? Granted that might not always be a requirement, but say the company is a non-profit organization with a global reach. Is there someone on staff to support the system for every different time zone, even if it’s in the middle of the night local time? With a hosted digital asset management system (or at least ours) the support is always available.

What happens as new file types emerge? Does the IT person have to research open source tools (if they exist) that allow supporting these files and spend more time implementing those tools? Is this the only thing he/she has going on? If not how long does the end-user have to wait to be able to ingest the new file types?

With a hosted DAM from a company that has been in the DAM business for years, file type updates happen regularly. We have internal resources to add the new support as the file types emerge as new trends or as customers make the request.

Of course with the home-grown (and for that matter any in-house) system, comes the need to purchase hardware, pay hardware support and eventually add storage and migrate to newer faster hardware. Also, is your home-grown system fault-tolerant, replicating data to other hardware so your users are never down if a computer fails? No worries if your system is in a (at least our) hosted environment.

Last, but far from least, a system that has been in use for years, by hundreds of organizations, has benefited from many suggestions on adding features to help people work better. Rolling your own system limits you to the best ideas within your own company. Going with a system that has evolved for a decade lets you benefit from the best ideas of many bright people. Why not take advantage of that?

So with a great hosted DAM system available, at extremely reasonable monthly pricing, aren’t your resources better spent on other projects rather than re-inventing the wheel?

Posted by Rande Simpson

Digital Asset Management - Fault Tolerance

If you work around computer systems with any regularity, you'll hear the phrase "fault tolerance" quite a bit.  You realize it's got to be a good thing, but what does it mean?  Is it something you need for your systems?

Fault tolerance is the general term that describes how quickly an important application can recover from a hardware failure, software problems or damaged data.  There are both hardware solutions – think multiple servers or hard disks - and software solutions – think automated backups or copies of your data stored in at least two locations.  Many fault tolerant systems combine hardware and software strategies, harnessing the combination to build a system where a serious problem can happen and not in any way  affect  the users on the system.  Well designed systems let managers repair the problem, bringing failed components back online while the users continue to work away happily.

Computers are clearly much more reliable than they used to be, but most people’s experience is that even so, things happen, and computers fail (and that usually happens at the worst possible time, of course!).

Whether you need your systems to be fault tolerant depends on how important your application is and how long you can wait to regain access to it in the case of a hardware problem.  If your users can go hours or days without using an application, the only fault tolerance you might need is a tested and verified backup strategy that will allow you to eventually rebuild your system from the ground up.  Of course, there aren't a lot of systems out there these days with users that would be happy to hear it would be days before they could get back in!

If that's the case for you, then you need to look at more robust solutions.  Fault tolerance can imply two things: either the storage is fault tolerant, so you can keep working even if a hard drive fails, or fully fault tolerant, meaning in addition to having hard drives fail you can have entire server computers fail, and the users are never disturbed as they work.

Fault-tolerant storage is done with drive arrays that write the stored data in a way that it is spread across multiple disks with hardware that allows you to replace a single failed drive while the rest of the drives are online that will rebuild the data onto the new drive. Fault tolerant storage is a good first step, and protects you from drive failures.  Running healthy drives won't help you if you have a problem with other hardware in your server or a problem with the OS that runs it.  So the next step is a fully fault-tolerant system, where you run redundant servers, all configured to support your applications and all keeping copies of your data.  There are various architectures to accomplish this, but what they have in common is enough hardware so that any individual component can fail and the users are able to keep working while an administrator replaces the failed components. Some fully fault-tolerant schemes are more efficient and economical than others. Most mission critical applications really need to be fully fault-tolerant, once you consider how much money you loose every hour such a system is down! That is why most of our license sales, and all our hosted digital asset management and ediscovery systems are fully fault tolerant: we supply our customers with a hosted Service Level Agreement where we have to refund them hard cash if the go down, and we’d rather not pay that money out!

Posted by Jennifer Cox

Digital Asset Management - The Next Generation

I am really excited about our new Merlin 5 digital asset management client, and there are lots of reasons why you should be as well.

When I joined MerlinOne nearly eight years ago, one of my first tasks was to document new features that had been incorporated into our venerable Merlin 4 client. This list of features came directly from user input and included text-centric things like keyboard macros (an easy way to input long text strings), a compare feature to look at images side-by-side, a new list view with sort-able columns, the ability to join stories, zap to text (highlight text anywhere and “pop” it to any field) and auto completion of fields when editing were just some of the new features we included in the update.

Support for “newer” operating systems (Windows XP and Mac OSX on PowerPC) was part and parcel of that client upgrade as well. The longevity of the M4 client often amazed me. During my travels I found the M4 client running on older systems just fine. At one site I visited, the M4 client was running on Windows 95. At another, a bondi blue iMac running MacOS 8.6 was quite happy to run the M4 client. Not much in the software world can claim that type of longevity.

Well, all good things come to an end I suppose, and it is time for the Merlin Rich Client to move on. In order to add the type of new functionality our customers wanted going forward, as well as support for video, the Merlin 5 Rich client was built from the ground up to be a modern client, supporting modern operating systems like Windows 7 and Apple’s Snow Leopard.

In addition to exciting new video asset management features like support for streaming video and searching within a video file, the Merlin 5 rich client makes it easier than ever to manage digital assets by allowing the batch editing of any fields and support for XMP side cars for raw camera files - not only on ingest but also on export.  Users can create their own search windows and save them as templates.  Important process functionality like slide show and compare have been improved to speed up workflow. There is more contextual menu support so mouse users can access commonly used functions with a right click.

We took a lot of good things and made them better. Our customers liked the metadata-based color code tagging applied to objects in M4. So did we, so M5 now supports tagging based on four different fields. The tags can be system wide, or applied to individual user groups.

Under the hood, the M5 client has been built with a plug-in architecture so that when it is time to add new features, it can be done easily.  We’ve also made it easier to manage M5 installations. Merlin5 has been written so that user profiles travel with the user. Whenever possible M5 will remember user settings, and resume with a similar client experience regardless of where a user is working.  Merlin 5 installations will also be able to take advantage of automatic upgrades.  Once a site approves a new M5 update, new features are pushed to appropriate users or groups automatically. No more sneaker disk to install updates.  This is keeping with one of our many goals, reducing support and user mouse clicks.

As always, the M5 client uses a simple and secure http connection to the database, no complex (ODBC) database connections. For our hosted sites, HTTPS connections provide an even more secure environment.

Soon all MerlinOne customers will be able to take advantage of the M5 client. Transitioning could not be easier, both the M4 and M5 client may be run together, ensuring customers can make a smooth transition to one of the most powerful digital asset management (DAM) workflow tools available.

Posted by David Breslauer