“Media asset administration” (MAM) and “digital asset administration” (DAM) are very comparable, however they’ve notable variations which make them greatest for various customers. That mentioned, sure DAMs have robust video administration performance which make them a good selection for customers who might make good use of different DAM options, too.

On this submit, we clarify:

• The variations between media asset administration software program and digital asset administration software program
• How to decide on between the 2 and slim down your choices
• Brandfolder’s media asset administration options for video and multimedia information

On the finish, we’ll additionally embrace a couple of different media asset administration software program to think about.

Need to tour Brandfolder’s media asset administration options and see our superior instruments for video and multimedia property? Request a free demo with our workforce to debate your precise wants and find out how we are able to tailor our DAM platform for you.

The time period “media asset administration” refers back to the processes and software program your groups use to handle video recordings, audio information, and different multimedia property.

Media asset administration (MAM) software program is usually utilized by video editors or producers, or those that work within the broadcast trade, however it’s a good selection for anyone who must handle a excessive quantity of wealthy media property as a result of it has superior options to assist video, audio, and multimedia manufacturing.

MAMs are totally different from digital asset administration options as a result of they’re geared extra for groups who simply have video and wealthy media to handle, whereas DAMs are for groups which have movies and different varieties of property. DAMs can be utilized by a wide range of groups throughout all industries; they settle for all file sorts and aren’t restricted to video and wealthy media information; they’ve superior options to assist all varieties of model collateral and the groups who want to make use of it.

Some DAM software program has additional video enhancing and publishing options to offer customers who’ve a number of video property the instruments to higher repurpose and make the most of them. So if you happen to’re in search of a digital asset administration software program that helps video, it is best to search for a model that provides these bells and whistles. Plus, most DAMs might be built-in with different video manufacturing software program to assist your complete content material creation workflow.

How you can Select Between Media Asset Administration & Digital Asset Administration Software program

So how do you select between the 2? It’s truly fairly simple.

You’re greatest fitted to media asset administration software program if….

• You’re employed in video manufacturing or are in search of a instrument particularly to assist video manufacturing.
• You’re employed within the broadcast trade and wish a instrument to help with media planning.

Use a digital asset administration system if….

• You could have quite a few asset sorts to handle, along with video, audio, and multimedia information.
• You could have a excessive quantity of video information and multimedia property to handle, however don’t want manufacturing workflow assist
• You’re employed outdoors of video manufacturing — for instance, in gross sales or advertising and marketing groups, promoting or PR, eComm or retail, images, training, hospitality, the record goes on…
• You need software program that works for the entire totally different groups and end-users that use your model property.

Take a look at our information of the most effective digital asset administration software program to be taught extra about the most well-liked DAM choices.

Brandfolder is persistently ranked top-of-the-line DAM software program as a result of it’s extremely versatile and constructed with dozens of additional options — akin to an superior video studio, for instance — to assist a wide range of groups and what they should accomplish.

Our DAM allows you to retailer all your model collateral in a single place, as an alternative of utilizing a number of totally different storage choices. As such, it prevents property from being unfold round and is ideal for customers that have to retailer all of their information (i.e., paperwork, photographs, movies, 3D fashions, and so forth.) in a single central location.

What’s much more handy is that Brandfolder is definitely customizable: We sit down with you earlier than even switching over to our DAM to debate what you want in a digital storage answer and decide how we are able to arrange Brandfolder to examine these bins. Brandfolder additionally integrates with quite a few different purposes and has an open-source API, so you possibly can join it with every other software program your groups use, together with video enhancing and video manufacturing instruments, and push property between platforms with ease.

Let’s speak a bit extra about Brandfolder’s video options and the way it’s designed that will help you handle your complete asset library.

Clear & Present Asset Library

Along with storing all your model property, Brandfolder makes it so much simpler to hold your asset library organized and up-to-date with permissions, duplicate asset detection, and expirations.

After you’ve moved all your movies and different digital content material to Brandfolder, you possibly can put a evaluate and approvals course of in place for all new property. You may even management who’s allowed to evaluate and approve property so duties aren’t solely delegated to 1 particular person admin, however moderately dispersed all through a number of admins in your workforce. This prevents unauthorized customers from including content material to your media library and ensures the whole lot that lives in your DAM has been given the inexperienced gentle to make use of.

Brandfolder’s duplicate asset detection additionally comes into play when importing property: This function analyzes what you’re importing to see if the identical file already exists in your DAM. If it does, Brandfolder will immediate you to cancel the add or merge the brand new file with the prevailing one. This function is helpful as a result of it prevents groups from having a number of variations of property mendacity round, however it’s particularly helpful for groups with a number of video footage as a result of video information eat up a great deal of cupboard space, and eliminating dupes ensures you’re not losing area.

You too can benefit from expirations to “retire” content material when it’s not wanted. When you’re utilizing video footage for a limited-time marketing campaign, akin to a vacation industrial or a promo video, you possibly can select a date to run out the content material in Brandfolder, after which customers can not obtain or use it after that given date. This provides you higher management over the content material lifecycle, from ingestion to expiration.

Don’t fear — the content material will nonetheless dwell in Brandfolder in case you ever need to entry it sooner or later, it’ll simply be labeled as “expired.”

Trackable Sharing Strategies

E mail has by no means been excellent for sharing digital content material as a result of it’s exhausting to maintain monitor of what’s been despatched and when, and you’ve got nearly no management over content material when you hit ship. To not point out, sending movies over e-mail is much more of a headache given how massive video information might be — we’ve even heard of groups having to ship video information in thumb drives through snail mail as a result of they’d an excessive amount of footage to ship on-line.

So to make life simpler, we offer two simple methods to share digital property in Brandfolder: You may add different Brandfolder customers to content material through permissions, or you possibly can ship property to exterior collaborators with a customized share hyperlink.

We additionally provide you with higher management over sharing — you possibly can modify permissions or customized share hyperlinks at any time, and all of our customized share hyperlinks are trackable so that you all the time know what content material has been shared. When sharing digital media through a share hyperlink, you possibly can add or take away content material, watermark content material or disable downloading for end-users, arrange real-time notifications for when customers open or obtain content material, set hyperlinks to run out, and extra.

These sharing strategies not solely make the act of sharing property simpler, however additionally they enhance the accessibility of property so different customers can log in to Brandfolder and discover accepted collateral on their very own phrases… with out having to ship an asset request each time they want a chunk of content material. This enables everyone — from the video editors who produce the content material to the groups who use it — to work extra productively.

Collaborative Workflow Options & Model Management

Brandfolder’s collaborative options streamline video (or different asset) updates by permitting groups to:

1. Remark with one another about edits on the precise asset, and reference that remark thread anytime they want.
2. Push the video file backwards and forwards between Brandfolder and its native enhancing app to shortly make modifications.
3. Evaluate edits in Brandfolder and approve the up to date video to be used.
4. Hold an in depth model historical past outlining the edits made and who made them.
5. Automate asset updates and assure everyone’s working off the newest model.

Brandfolder integrates with a wide range of content material creation instruments, together with Adobe’s Inventive Cloud and different video manufacturing software program, so you possibly can push new content material instantly from these platforms to Brandfolder. Our integrations assist customers to keep away from the cumbersome means of downloading and re-uploading movies between platforms to allow them to get pleasure from a smoother enhancing course of.

Our collaborative options and integrations enhance workforce communication, model management, and guarantee all customers are staying in the identical place to work on property.

As well as, Brandfolder now encompasses a built-in challenge administration suite, referred to as Workspace, the place groups can work on digital tasks in a single shared dashboard. Workspace appears to be like and feels so much like the everyday challenge administration software program: It allows you to break down massive tasks into smaller duties, assign duties to different workforce members, examine on job standing, prioritize duties based mostly on significance or due date, look again on accomplished duties, and extra.

Our DAM system additionally integrates with Smartsheet for extra superior challenge administration capabilities.

Learn Extra: Study our digital asset administration instruments for creatives and design groups.

Superior Video Studio

On prime of collaborative instruments for creatives and video editors, our Superior Video options empower everyone — even customers with completely zero video enhancing information — to repurpose video information for his or her particular person tasks. This fashion, they don’t should ask a designer or different workforce member with video enhancing expertise to help with their duties, and everyone has the assets to make the most of your model’s video content material.

Within the Superior Video suite, you possibly can:

• Trim video information to chop out the moments you don’t need or want
• Create video clips or GIFs for social media or different on-line channels
• Convert video file codecs (.mp4, .mov, .flv) or modify the decision (1080p, 720p, or 480p)
• Add branded watermarks to movies and modify the watermark’s look
• Create video thumbnails and entry an embeddable hyperlink so you possibly can submit your video throughout the online
• Evaluate your video footage in our high-quality media participant

When you make modifications, you possibly can obtain the modified video and use it in your tasks. Alternatively, you possibly can pull video information into branded templates, push movies to different purposes with integrations, or use Brandfolder to publish movies on-line.

Be aware: Brandfolder gained’t completely save any of those modifications, so your authentic video file will all the time stay intact no matter who’s utilizing it. Your video information will solely replace if an admin or inventive makes alterations within the Workflow tab and replaces the video file with a brand new model.

One other cool perk of storing movies in Brandfolder: Our transcription function. Once you import your video footage, our software program routinely transcribes the audio to textual content and shops the transcription within the asset’s metadata. That manner, you should utilize the search performance to find movies by dialogue, evaluate video content material with out having to playback the video, and pull the transcript for captions, subtitles, video evaluation, and different video enhancing tasks.

Brandguide

To provide designers and video editors higher peace of thoughts, Brandfolder additionally allows you to create and retailer detailed model tips throughout the platform. This ensures that everyone who can entry your video information is aware of precisely how they’ll use them.

With our Brandguide function, you possibly can copy model tips from one other doc if you have already got some written up, or you possibly can draft new tips in Brandfolder. The set-up prompts stroll you thru your complete course of.

There’s no proper or mistaken approach to arrange your model tips — you might be as concise or detailed as you want. However usually, we see groups who work with video content material use the Brandguide function to stipulate:

• The kind of tone they need their branded movies to have
• Permitted language for movies… together with what to not say
• Permitted music, sounds, graphics, and so forth. to make use of in movies
• The place movies might be posted
• How movies might be altered
• Specs for downloading and publishing video information (i.e., most popular file kind, decision, and so forth.)
• The kind of model components to incorporate when posting movies on-line
• How you can watermark movies and examples of accepted watermarks

On the finish, your model tips are displayed in a elegant, branded portal, and the web page structure ensures that all your info is straightforward to browse, bettering the person expertise.

Having accessible model tips vastly improves model consistency and reduces the variety of questions inventive groups and movies editors should area about find out how to use collateral.

For extra tips about model administration, observe our model consistency guidelines.

Copy & Paste On-line Publishing

Brandfolder additionally has a built-in content material supply community (CDN) system so you should utilize Brandfolder as a single supply of reality and energy on-line content material out of your DAM.

So how does this work?

Every of your property in Brandfolder, together with all your wealthy media information, is assigned a singular CDN hyperlink. You may entry this hyperlink throughout the asset overview after which publish your content material on-line by copying and pasting the hyperlink the place you need your asset to dwell.

You should use CDN hyperlinks in e-mail advertising and marketing campaigns, eCommerce websites, and different internet pages, content material administration methods, (or actually wherever on the net). This makes the method of publishing video information a lot sooner as a result of you possibly can simply hyperlink your video throughout web sites as an alternative of downloading the content material and importing it each place you need to publish it.

Utilizing Brandfolder’s CDN system to publish on-line content material can also be useful as a result of:

1. Brandfolder tracks all CDN hyperlinks so you understand precisely the place your content material lives on-line.
2. It eliminates the tedious job of swapping property each time edits are made, as all modifications made on the Brandfolder stage routinely replicate in all places the asset is embedded.

To learn extra about utilizing digital asset administration software program to publish on-line content material, try our DAM for publishing submit.

Customizable Reporting Options

You too can hold a better eye on how and the place your movies and different property are used with Brandfolder Insights. With our reporting dashboard, you possibly can take a look at:

• Which property are considered and downloaded most incessantly (a.ok.a. “High Performers”)
• Who’s downloading and utilizing your property most frequently (a.ok.a. “High Customers”)
• Who’s sharing property, with whom, and the way usually
• And extra

Plus, our reporting options are utterly customizable, so you possibly can monitor totally different information over totally different time durations.

Our reporting function additionally provides you perception into the content material it’s essential to create because it exhibits the whole lot your customers are looking for in Brandfolder. You may see which search phrases generate useful outcomes, and which of them depart customers requesting extra. Then you possibly can plan accordingly and implement new video tasks round their wants.

Does Brandfolder have the best media asset administration options to your groups? Discover the ins and outs of our digital asset administration system and resolve if we’re actually the best DAM to your wants by getting began with a free demo and session.

When you want a extra strong media asset administration system to assist video enhancing or manufacturing, contemplate the three choices under:

VSNExplorer

An enterprise media asset administration system, this uber-advanced answer has numerous options to provide new video content material, retailer and protect video information, distribute video information to others, plan media tales, and schedule movies/multimedia for publishing. Additionally they provide dozens of different software program to assist their MAM system.

This answer is standard as a result of it covers the whole lot you’d want (and extra) for video manufacturing and media planning, however its interface is just a little outdated, it’s considerably difficult to make use of, and it has an costly price ticket.

eMAM

eMAM, or Empress Media Asset Administration, is a considerably extra primary media asset administration system that has numerous instruments to provide new content material, collaborate with different workforce members on video tasks, and retailer movies in a single accessible repository.

eMAM provides a wide range of MAM options for various workforce sizes, however their platform is exclusive as a result of they provide these options in each cloud-based and on-premise choices — so it is a viable choice for customers who want self-hosted software program.

eMAM has a lower cost level than different media asset administration platforms, however reviewers say the platform is all the time “underneath development” so it’s exhausting to maintain up with new options and requires ongoing coaching.

MediaCentral

MediaCentral is typically categorized as a digital asset administration platform, however at its core, it’s a media workflow answer for groups who have to deal with video and multimedia manufacturing. It’s standard amongst distant groups and customers who work with collaborators from all around the world as a result of it’s constructed to unify groups, assist communication, and increase effectivity.

MediaCentral’s MAM is fairly customizable, you possibly can choose the options you want and arrange the integrations that greatest fit your groups and workflows. Their answer is marketed for groups throughout virtually all industries and verticals, and their onboarding workforce may help get you arrange.

The one factor is that MediaCentral’s software program might be dear: You must choose right into a subscription, and many of the options are tacked on as extras, so that you’re consistently being upsold when it’s essential to entry a brand new function or add a brand new person. As well as, MediaCentral will get so-so critiques, some reviewers benefit from the platform as a result of it’s easy, however some say the software program is tough to be taught and use.

Get Began With Brandfolder For Free

Discovering the best on-line storage answer to your model property comes all the way down to contemplating:

• Why you want a extra superior storage answer and the pains you’re presently dealing with
• Which sort of software program has the options and functionalities it’s essential to resolve these issues

With simply these two issues, you possibly can select between MAM and DAM options, and slim down your choices from there. However if you happen to’re nonetheless on the fence, we’re all the time right here to assist.

Our hands-on buyer expertise workforce is on the market to stroll you thru the Brandfolder platform and provide help to resolve if our digital asset administration instrument is really the most effective match for your enterprise. We’ll speak to you about your groups’ particular wants and the way your totally different customers can leverage Brandfolder to bolster their workflows. We’ll even gameplan the onboarding course of with you so that you’re by no means by yourself to sort out this transition.

To be taught extra about Brandfolder’s options, customization, and pricing, click on the button under.