Basic Concepts

Please also see BASIC CONCEPTS- Metus INGEST for signal types, video standards, video compression, file wrappers, streaming protocols and other concepts.

ASSET

Asset is the combination of a target media file (video, audio, picture, documents, tape cassettes, etc) with metadata (info about the asset), proxy of the hi-res file, storyboard, thumbnail, any attached documents and different versions of the media file. You can have multiple and different assets from the same source file.

Please see The Asset - 4.0.0.0 in Metus MAM

THUMBNAIL

Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the case of video content, they are basically snapshot images from the video.

Please see Thumbnail Options - 4.0.0.0 in Metus MAM

PROXY

Proxy is a lower resolution copy of the original file, serving the purpose of less storage and bandwidth consumption. It consists of highly compressed, low resolution video that mirrors a high resolution original master digital recording. Since proxy AV data is timecode synchronized with the original, much smaller in size, and can be sent faster than real-time over TCP/IP networks, it can be used quickly for viewing, scripting and editing.

Please see Proxy - 4.0.0.0 in Metus MAM

STORYBOARD

A video storyboard is a group of frames (pictures) for the purpose of pre-visualizing a video sequence. It serves as a summary for the whole video, at first sight.

Please see Storyboard - 4.0.0.0 in Metus MAM

METADATA

When speaking of managing content, metadata is essential. Simply put, metadata is ‘data about data’ -information about a video file, audio clip, or a web page like file locations, assigned IDs, durations, titles, descriptions, annotations, key words, usage rights- With a rich metadata catalogue of assets and advanced search capabilities, users spend less time searching and more time finding/creating content within their MAM structures.

Please see Metadata - 4.0.0.0 and Search - 4.0.0.0 in Metus MAM

VIDEO TAPE

A video tape is a recording of images and sounds on to magnetic tape . Information stored can be in the form of either an analog or digital signal. Videotape is used in both video tape recorders (VTRs) or, more commonly and more recently, videocassette recorder (VCR) and camcorders. Tape is a linear method of storing information and since nearly all video recordings made nowadays are digital direct to disk recording (DDR), videotape has lost importance as expected, as non-linear/random-access methods of storing digital video data became more common.

TAPE DRIVE

A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. A tape drive provides sequential access storage, unlike a disk drive, which provides random access storage. A disk drive can move to any position on the disk in a few milliseconds, but a tape drive must physically wind tape between reels to read any one particular piece of data. As a result, tape drives have very slow average seek times. For sequential access once the tape is positioned, however, tape drives can stream data very fast. Recently, Linear Tape-Open (LTO) supported continuous data transfer rates of up to 150 MB/s, easily comparable to hard disk drives.

Please see # single drive support in Metus MAM

TAPE LIBRARY

Tape library is a storage device which contains one or more tape drives, a number of slots to hold tape cartridges, a barcode reader to identify tape cartridges and an automated method -a robot- for loading tapes.

Please see #tape library support in Metus MAM

HSM

Hierarchical storage management (HSM) is a data storage technique which automatically moves data between high-cost and low-cost storage media. HSM systems exist because high-speed storage devices (such as hard disk drive arrays) are more expensive (per byte stored) than slower devices such as optical discs and magnetic tape drives. While it would be ideal to have all data available on high-speed devices all the time, this is prohibitively expensive for many organizations. Instead, HSM systems store the bulk of the enterprise's data on slower devices, and then copy data to faster disk drives when needed. In effect, HSM turns the fast disk drives into caches for the slower mass storage devices.

Please see #tape library support in Metus MAM

Please see Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) - 4.0.0.0 in Metus MAM

NLE (Non-Linear Editing)

A non-linear editing system (NLE) is a video and/or audio editing workstation system that performs non-destructive editing on source material. The name is in contrast to 20th century methods of linear tape video editing and film editing. The editors are essential in a TV or production workflow, creating a solution for them to work (search, find, export / import from the central content archive) rapidly and easily.

Grass Valley Edius, Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas can be listed among the industry standard NLE solutions.

Please see NLE Plug-ins in Metus MAM

XML

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The design goals of XML emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability over the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for the languages of the world. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, it is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures. Many application programming interfaces (APIs) have been developed to aid software developers with processing XML data, and several schema systems exist to aid in the definition of XML-based languages.

Please see How to export external metadata from 3rd party systems for an example of XML usage in practice.

SQL

Structured Query Language (SQL) is a special-purpose programming language designed for managing data held in a relational database management system. The scope of SQL includes data insert, query, update and delete, schema creation and modification, and data access control.

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft Inc. As a database, it is a software product whose primary function is to store and retrieve data as requested by other software applications, be it those on the same computer or those running on another computer across a network.

Please see Metus MAM Components and database server for more information

Active Directory

Active Directory (AD), is a directory service implemented by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. It is included in most Windows Server operating systems.

An AD domain controller authenticates and authorizes all users and computers in a Windows domain type network—assigning and enforcing security policies for all computers and installing or updating software. For example, when a user logs into a computer that is part of a Windows domain, Active Directory checks the submitted password and determines whether the user is a system administrator or normal user.

Please see User and Groups - 4.0.0.0 in Metus MAM to see how you can import user domain information through Active Directory