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Growing Multimedia Assets: Image Base

Many are familiar with iView MediaPro as an image management tool used by pro photographers. What’s less familiar is that MediaPro is a multimedia asset management application. Beyond images, MediaPro can deftly handle file formats such as audio, video, graphics, illustrations, fonts – a diverse range and volume of digital media that’s the life blood of a dynamic graphic design and video production company.

Image Base is a full service business communications company that specializes in video, interactive and event production. The company’s name reflects the vision of founder, Ralph Murnyak.

“When we started in 1984, we aimed at servicing our key clients by providing them complete production service for visual presentations,” says Murnyak. “In the beginning, media asset management involved boxes of 35mm slides and lots of shelves.”

Kevin Blake, president and veteran of 21 years adds, “Over the years, as the media became electronic so did our library catalog system. It is really just the natural progression of our client-centric philosophy, applying today’s best digital technology.”

Today Image Base provides production and creative services to a wide range of clients, leveraging their catalog of digital media assets as an additional value to them. Murnyak adds, “We develop projects in various arenas with clients like the Beef Industry, Nintendo, Kraft Foods, Pepsico, and Motorola. We bring value-added service to them, first because our producers all understand their business, but secondly because we have access to a myriad of visual, and audio content at our fingertips.

"When I start a design or video project, I like to loosely gather a bunch of pertinent images and video clips from the library and drag them into a new catalog. I then look over all the media assets available to me and begin some creative brainstorming. I save this catalog to easily get back to the original media files as I should need them. It saves copying time and disk space organizing this way since I'm collecting only the thumbnails and not the actual data. As I proceed through the project, I copy media out of the library only as needed."
Michael Lizak, Art Director, Image Base

Michael Lizak is art director at Image Base. He tells the story of how Image Base is using MediaPro from iView (a wholly-owned Microsoft subsidiary) as the backbone to its digital asset retrieval system.

“For many years we have accumulated a very large number of diverse multi-media resources including photos, video, music, clipart, and fonts. We would find a desired piece of media by visually searching through multiple thumbnail catalogs that accompanied photo CDs. Finding music and sound effects was equally inefficient since there was no way to quickly search for file information such as track titles and track descriptions. For us, it was becoming unacceptably time-consuming to locate the resources we needed for given projects. Handling the media constantly was also unproductive because, for example, CDs could become scratched and unreadable. They would become misplaced in various edit suites. Finding a desired asset–image or music–was becoming a job in itself.

“About a year ago my colleague, producer Christian Castagna, and I decided to get our digital assets in order. Having used MediaPro for years, I suggested that we implement it company-wide. As far as I know, it is the only DAM software that can handle and manage a wide variety of media–not just photos.

“We wanted to organize everything. I looked into using Extensis Portfolio, Cumulus, Apple iPhoto, and as many possibilities as I could find on Google. All other options were quickly dismissed since they only dealt with cataloging images. MediaPro was, and as far as I know still is, the only solution if one wants to catalog a wide variety of media types with one piece of software.

“First we copied our entire collection of CD and DVD media–photo, illustration, clip art, video, and music–to several hard drives. Copying the media was a rather slow process, so we spread it across several Macs and enlisted some of our staff to help. Then we batch-annotated as much of the media as possible using MediaPro scripts. Metadata was already included in most of the photo and video CDs we had. Music library companies helped by sending us their metadata so we could add it to our library.

“Ninety-nine percent of our projects are customized to communicate a particular message. That requires specific imagery or specific music each and every time. Having the ability to quickly and easily search for and audition tens of thousands of images and music tracks allows us to find the right image and the right cuts of music for every job.”
Christian Castagna, Producer, Image Base

“While the annotating was progressing, I created an application in Apple’s Xcode to act as a front end to MediaPro. My plan was to have all of our media contained on one Mac, which was the server, and have everyone on our network be able to quickly search, preview, and copy the files they needed.

“The application manages and streamlines all of the networking and system operations for the remote computers. This greatly simplifies the process of accessing the server’s catalogs and media files.

“When viewing video clips on remote computers within MediaPro, one valuable advantage is that NTSC-sized footage actually plays off the server’s hard disk and can be viewed in real-time on the remote computer. Music can also be auditioned this way. Another bonus is that MediaPro catalogs can be viewed on PCs as well. I created a front-end application in Flash for the PC that has the same functionality as the Mac version.

“Today our digital media assets are online, searchable and instantaneously available without having to deal with the cumbersome overhead of dealing with CDs and DVDs. All 772 gigabytes of our digital media files are accessible within two mouse clicks from any computer on our network. The Image Base media library powered by MediaPro has been in use for one year now. It continues to increase our productivity and creative workflow on a daily basis.”

Growing Digital Assets

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CONTACT INFORMATION

Michael Lizak
Art Director/Designer
Image Base - Graphics Dept.
michaell@image-base.com

Kathy Madison
Arcand & Madison Public Relations for iView
kathy@am-pr.com
cell +1 781.640.1850