D.W. Leitner delivers another one of his well, enlightening, encyclopedic tours of media technology in this posting on millimeter's site.

Looking over the most recent developments in LED production lighting from top vendors, David knows how to put things into context, moving from Edison to CFLs in the politic environment on to the wide range of light emitting diode-based portable lighting rigs introduced at NAB 2010.

Check out his blog Leitner's Cinematography Corner for more.

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For most folks working day to day in film and video production, digital asset management is a concept they may have heard about, but don't necessarily keep in mind.

After all, it's tough enough to raise the money, do the production and post on budget and on time, and finish far enough ahead of the game to do it again.

But if properly understood and implemented, digital asset management (DAM) brings a set of added, useful capabilities to both the production and distribution of film, video, and other digital media. Besides grunt work like helping track the myriad files and folders that get generated in today's productions, DAM can help you best control future monetization of your creative efforts.

(You'll also see the term MAM or media asset management used. While it's a bit more specific in targeting media as the main asset you'll be managing, the term DAM has become more popular. We'll use both interchangeably for now.)

That brings us around to the annual Henry Stewart confab, held this past May in the City. The London-based Henry Stewart group holds DAM conferences on a regular basis, with New York and Los Angeles being the most relevant to this readership. New York, of course, because it is here, and Los Angeles, well… unfortunately for those living here, the LA event in the fall always has lots more presentations relevant to actual film production and post. New York's emphasis is understandably most centered on the publishing and broadcast industries, with enough on digital media and video postproduction to make it a worthwhile visit.

But there is still plenty to learn from attending the New York event. Besides offering a chance to see some of the top vendors side-by-side, this still modest sized show is also a great opportunity to spend enough time to dig deep with one or two particular systems that might interest you.

Just getting a sense of what's involved with considering an asset management system is a good place to start. That's just what Amit Kumar does for companies as the senior business development manager for media and entertainment at Paramus, New Jersey-based ITC Infotech. Rather than sell any one package, ITC Infotech helps advise companies before they make what can be a considerable investment.

"The first step is to clearly understand what the company does step by step as it runs its business," says Kumar. "The actual work begins with information architecture modeling and taxonomy design, controlled vocabulary design, and finally developing the metadata models themselves."

"Asset management give you a means to control your content,” says Kumar. "Besides embedding metadata, you can also embed things like copyright information such as to what length of time the asset can be used and in what particular geographical areas."

Taking a look at all the new, relevant products at the show would make for a very long article, so instead I'll just note some of the more interesting projects and technologies. We'll be presenting other articles on digital asset management soon, so stay tuned.

North Plain's chart shows how all inclusive a DAM system can be.

One long-time player in our industry, Toronto-based North Plains Systems, continued building out its TeleScope Video Manager, said to be one of the most popular DAM systems in the broadcast industry.

TeleScope Video Manager 3 debuted at the show. It enables secure archiving of video productions, simplifies rights managed access to your video archive and makes distribution across organizations and third party agencies seamless, according to the company.

Integration with the rest of post is key: it configures easily with third party non-linear editing software (think Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid editing systems) as well as various archiving, transcoding, and delivery systems.

One growing area of concern—can you take advantage of new ways of distributing content? A DAM will help reduce channel complexity, says North Plains, meaning you can approach getting your work out via HDTV, IPTV, mobile phones, iPods, iPads, and video-on-demand without reinventing the process at each step along the way.

One neat capability: you can edit and annotate hi-resolution, 16-track audio proxies via a web browser.

The new release also includes full support for two Telestream products, FlipFactory 7.0 video transcoding software and Telestream Pipeline video capture system. North Plains TeleScope DAM and Video Manager use the popular FlipFactory to extract video metadata, transcode and deliver video, and create storyboards. Video Manager 3.1, in concert with FlipFactory 7.0, can create high definition H.264 MPEG 4 proxies with 16 channels of compressed audio (AAC) for reduced file size while maintaining high resolution and time-code accuracy.

If you don't want to be bothered with installing and maintaining the software yourself, you can also take advantage of North Plains' software as a service offering and just use it its online version.

Berkeley-based Xinet released Video 4.0 for WebNative Suite at the show. Better management of multimedia files has to be on anybody's must do list so the new version does just that by adding control of Shockwave Flash and HTML files while expanding its Video Reel Generator app to include soundtracks and previews of all files in the videos generated.

Working solely via a web interface, with Video users can search, view, annotate, approve and distribute video files, as well as create video reels seamlessly.

NetXposure helps MoMA keep track of its soup cans.

Portland Oregon based NetXposure released NetXposure 5.5 at the show. This is the first major update to the fifth version of NetXposure’s web-based Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution, and so updates that apps incorporation of an Adobe Flex user interface.

Adobe's Flex is a Rich Internet Application (RIA)—Microsoft's Silverlight is the other major RIA—which are designed to blur the distinction between the desktop and the Internet. Flex delivers a slick user experience more tuned for use in systems that 'point outwards' to the public, pertinent in this case, instead of functioning solely for internal use.

Improvements in this 5.5 version, according to the company, include better efficiency (faster screen loading and file importing) and stability when handling large volumes of files compared to version 5.0.

You can check out the results yourself by visiting MoMA--in person or via their web site--as the museum uses NetXposure’s DAM to build out its centralized image repository. With MoMa's collection of more than 150,000 pieces and over 22,000 film and media works, the initial database (not a DAM app) had become ungainly, not to say incapable of handling all the new sorts of information the museum now wanted to track.

Thankfully, NetXposure was able to incorporate the existing legacy collection's database; the company claims that MoMA now "saves $200,000 a year in production costs" by relying on the DAM software, which runs on a Mac OS X server and Apple Xserve RAID combo.

This is just a light overview, a look at some of the DAM asset management products available today. Check back for our coverage of other DAM products and approaches. Next up: Leipzig-based Ceiton Technologies, which recently sold systems to A&E, Warners, and Sony.

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While Steve Jobs might be bad-mouthing Adobe's Flash, the flexible code still plays most of the video found on the web. That popularity is one of the reasons that Zeitbyte Digital Media recently debuted zeitCaster 2.0, a Flash-based video player for the web.

This Chelsea-based media services company also shoots, edits, hosts, and streams video besides developing custom video players for top clients such as Universal Music Group. I previously wrote about Zeitbyte growing and adding staff which you can find here.

Zeitbyte wrote zeitCaster from the core on up so that they could include unique capabilities such as a CMS (content management system), which allows users to add metadata to stored data for enhanced search, etc. Over the next few weeks, Zeitbyte promises to deliver a plug-in playlist builder that can tag videos with metadata.

Another new capability—support for multi-bitrate video playback—solves a problem that can lead to confusing the user: you don't want to repeat info for each version of a stored video. Instead, it should only show up once in a playlist, which is what Version 2.0 accomplishes.

The upgrade also adds a modular, plug-in architecture so that clients can build a custom player that only has the features they need; a capability of playing both live and on-demand files (allows you to simultaneously stream both a live feed and non-video info such as a live chat room that comments on the video); and flexibility for complex layouts (including chat rooms, photo catalogs and realtime Q&A).

New clients who will use the player include TDK, Con Edison and the Jeff Buckley Foundation.

By the way, if you are curious about the core arguments over the recent huffing and puffing between Apple and Adobe (i.e. HTML5 versus Flash), you might check out this short but informative interview with Zeitbyte President Gary Kahn.

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That's the promise of this free webcast that runs on Tuesday, August 10th at 2pm EST. Instructors run the gamut: Panasonic's Jan Crittenden Livingston (Panasonic's business manager for 3D camcorders); Robert Willox (Director of 3D Business Development, Sony); and Dimitris Athos (3D Stereoscopic Producer) are among them.

Topics include: When to choose 3D; Where will anyone see my work?; and A look at budgets for independent filmmakers in 3D.

More info on the event and the folks involved can be found here

Since the webcast is "limited to 500" attendees, you might want to sign up now. Or at least that's what I gather from the excited tone that's pretty typical of such emails. ("You will not get this depth of expertise ANYWHERE ELSE!")

I don't know how much you can gain from such presentations--hands on is definitely better--though if you're totally new to 3D this might offer a useful overview.

A Q & A is promised after the presentation to "make sure your questions get answered."

You might think of this webcast as a teaser for Createasphere's real product: a series of workshops on 3D production to be held in New York around September 19th-21st, which will cost you a bit to attend. The two workshops currently on tap are part of Createasphere's Entertainment Technology Expo (prior to this it was HD Expo) on September 21st-22nd.

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ARRI's Alexa camera system, which only recently started distributing, looks like it's already a top contender for high-end professional production. It's getting kudos for its quality output and a production-friendly systems approach.

There's lots to like: the camera's compact form factor, extremely wide f-stop range (a claimed 13 ½ stops dynamic range), hi-res viewfinder, 800 EI exposure range, and low noise output are just some of the specifics that lifts it over competition such as Sony's F35, now a bit long in the tooth. Sony's F35, however, is an accepted partner in high-end production, so that situation won't change anytime soon.

One good move: the Munich-based company didn't pretend it had all the answers, but decided to bring the camera out as part of a production and postproduction ecosystem, a viable strategic approach for any new camera system that hopes to become popular enough to make its investment back. Of course Arri doesn't have the deep pockets or broad product line that a Sony does, so they have to make this work.

Of course Arri products already have a great reputation. Founded in 1917, they turn out gear DPs are familiar and comfortable with, and have a few years of experience over newbies like RED.

Building in Apple ProRes encoding as native, for example, acknowledges upfront that the camcorder fits within a post environment. Too bad so many high-end commercial and feature editors use Avid and not Apple's Final Cut Pro; transcoding between ProRes and Avid's native DnXHD is possible, though slow, dulling some of that advantage.

Arri's partners include Apple (ProRes encoding), Sony (via its small-as-a-stick-of gum SxS storage), and other top names such as Panavision, Avid, Iridas, DVS, Digital Vision, Filmlight, and MTI.

Vince Pace, who designed the 3-D rigs used in Avatar among other projects, is sending Alexa-based 3-D rigs to Martin Scorsese for use in his next project Hugo Cabret.

While Arri will handle most sales through its own show rooms and dealers as well as established rental houses, it selected Abel Cine as an authorized reseller, tapping into that company's status among indie's and smaller productions. Pricing is said to hover around $60k, although that's a variable with add-on options and deals.

Check out this Alexa post on Abel Cine's tech blog to see the future of integrated production and post systems. Based around a direct connection between shooting in Apple's ProRes format directly into Final Cut, this video shows just how straight forward high-end post can become. Sure beats what editors and facility engineers had to go through even recently.

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Augmented Reality (AR), as its enthusiasts insist, will sooner or later change the way we interact with the world.

We've presented some of the AR apps now making life easier for New Yorkers (NYC BigApps Winner Does AR) and important writers covering the scene (Chris Greyson on Mobile AR).

Now you have a chance to experience AR from the start-up level on up by attending the monthly meeting of ARNY this Tuesday evening, July 20^th. Hosted by Ori Inbar, these meet-ups offer a relaxed approach to digital tech centered around short, snappy presentations in a spectacular venue (local scouts take note).

These get togethers are a good way to learn how leading New York developers are moving this technology to a top position in Silicon Alley's push to carve a place for East coast digital media entrepreneurs.

Among other presentations, you'll see the “first ever live demo” of Moo Vision, an app created for Ben & Jerry's and a State of the Union on AR Eyewear by Chris Grayson.

ARNY uses Meet Up to both enroll new ARNY members and sign up for the actually meeting.

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If you need to work with lots of high-resolution images—for editing, design, scientific research—you're in luck. Turns out there's a number of capable graphics systems that will allow you to pull together a system that's orders of magnitude cheaper than only a few years ago.

That's according to Jon Peddie, who heads a company under his own name that tracks these things. I've known Jon for years—he's a regular at Siggraph presentations and on other occasions where it's useful to have someone who can straddle both graphics and marketing. More info here.

You can sign up on his site to get sent updates on an irregular basis, i.e. when Jon thinks there's something interesting to talk about. He's tracked the industry for years, so you know you're getting some straight stuff.

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Growing numbers of DPs now use HDSLRs—the most popular seem to be Canon's EOS series—to solve specific shooting needs. Others are starting to embrace them in order to shoot entire feature films, enjoying the camera's small size and price combined with great glass and 1080p HD output.

Now, cinematographers are chasing down lenses out of the mainstream, choosing one lens for the 'creamy' look it delivers, or another for its color rendition or other unique features.

Shane Hurlbut, A.S.C., does just that in a recent blog posting devoted to the highly regarded Leica R lenses. Since most HDSLRs inherently mount only to each manufacturer's camera, Hurlbut goes into the rejiggering that must be done to fit them to a Canon EOS series, along with details on other modifications. You can find that info here.

Hurlbut recently finished shooting a feature shot mostly with the Canon 5D Mark II, claiming it will be the first HDSLR-shot full-length feature released by a major studio.

You can find Shane's main tech website here.

He recommends this Leica R and Canon database for anyone wanting the tech details on mating the two.

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It might be a little odd at first to think of New York--and not Japan--as home to one of the leading high-end video hardware manufacturers. But that's the rep Leroy Street-based Cinedeck is garnering with the recent release of Cinedeck Extreme, a portable direct to disk recorder that upgrades its initial product.

More than just a straight recorder, Cinedeck Extreme is actually a touchscreen-controlled computer, boasting RAID-support and a considerable number of useful capabilities. It's significant that the device sports the visually lossless CineForm Digital Intermediate codec, co-developed with CineForm, an innovative, game-changing company in their own right.

I'll soon post an in-depth interview with the principals of Cinedeck; I'll dig into some of the thinking behind how two guys ran past the big boys to deliver such a useful piece of gear. Until then, you can read Videography's review of the Cinedeck Extreme for tech details.

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You probably don't spend your time thinking about how DAM (digital asset management), MAM (media asset management) or Web Workflow (pretty much what it sounds like) fit into your media business, but you should.

(MAM is the more appropriate term here, as it's mainly concerned with audio, video and other media content.)

Each technology aims to make sense of how to deal with quickly growing digital content (Twenty-four hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute), or finding ways to use software to support and supervise the things you do in your company.

Now it might not be too apparent why I'm talking about MAM and workflow management together. But both of these terms seek to use computers, software and some basically simple templates to add order to that unruly proliferation of media, or figure out how computers can help run your business in a smoother, more coherent fashion to save you time and money.

This first article only introduces what will be an ongoing series to help make sense of these important technologies. Although I'm be taking most of my examples from Fortune 500-level companies (they use MAM systems that begin pricing at $50,000), don't think this is just an academic exercise—like most everything in our digital age, the software behind these technologies will be making their way to you sooner than you may think.

Along the way I'll be talking about some of the cool concepts I discovered at the recent Henry Stewart DAM conference in New York, as well as what companies like Ceiton (recently in town, A&E tapped them for a cool workflow app) can tell us about how we can be smarter in using web-based technologies to manage our companies.

Please stay tuned. If you think of any issues or companies you've heard of that might be relevant, let me know (dan [at] nycppnews.com) and I'll be happy to investigate.

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