BeBop Ecosystem…Seamless MAM Integration with the BeBop Platform

BeBop Technology is the leader in building cloud solutions for Media and Entertainment. If you’re familiar with us, you probably think of BeBop primarily as a platform for doing editorial in the cloud using Adobe Premiere Pro or Avid Media Composer, or you think of us as VFX solution for using Autodesk’s Maya or Adobe After Effects in the cloud. 

But BeBop is so much more than that; we designed BeBop to be a complete end-to-end solution for moving post-production to the cloud. Our platform is an ecosystem that not only enables things like Over The Shoulder review and approval, Rocket File Transfer to mirror your on prem workflows in the cloud, and disaster recovery and business continuity, but also supports numerous industry-standard tools that go beyond visual effects and editorial.

Working in the cloud gives us unprecedented access to compute and storage resources far beyond what is available in all but the most advanced on-premise data centers. It allows us to get work done in a massively parallel fashion as well as experiment with boundless imagination and resources. This immense flexibility allows cloud postproduction workflows to keep up with 21st century creative talent. To deeply illustrate the power our cloud ecosystem affords creatives and media companies, I’m going to be writing a multi-part series of posts about working efficiently on the BeBop platform, and in this first post I’ll be focusing on seamless MAM integration with the BeBop Platform.

A MAM is not an island. Building a collection of services around a Media Asset Management system can be challenging if each piece of the puzzle doesn’t fit with the next. It must integrate with its surroundings. What is commonly thought of as a MAM is a tightly coupled collection of services often consisting of ingest, transcoding, storage, backup, and archive. What completes the pipeline are post-production and distribution. These operations are part of the macro-ecosystem that function as a complete solution for processing media. There are two ways to integrate your MAM/PAM into the BeBop ecosystem that build a more efficient media pipeline.

The first is to have your MAM populate a collection of assets for the editor into an inbound object store. Once there, the BeBop Rocket protocol can copy them into the high-speed block storage linked to your workstation and utilized for post-production. When the project is completed, the assets can then be put into an outbound object store (again utilizing BeBop Rocket) that can be monitored by the MAM for the ingest of new material as well as any deliverables. Rocket can also deliver directly to distribution through your DAM as well. The benefit is that this can be done in the background without having to log in to a workstation.

The second way to round-trip assets is to utilize the native panels that your MAM vendor provides for your NLE or other post-production tools (like VFX). Panels typically use API calls to the MAM to deliver assets to the workstation directly. This method allows users to interact with the content and its database of metadata while still allowing the PAM functions to track how the content is used in each project. The down side is that the data is only transferring while the user is logged into the workstation.

Utilizing the object store method, an asset management system can also pass along incoming content for analysis such as metadata enhancement. This is an important capability if AI metadata enhancement is not built into your MAM. Keep in mind that your asset management system is only as good as the metadata around it. If people can’t find assets, there’s no point in implementing it.

Once the decision has been made to put the asset management system(s) in the cloud, it gives technologists the flexibility to implement workflows that were, until recently, impossible to budget for most content producers. The BeBop Platform with BeBop Rocket can help maintain a secure, collaborative workspace that is cloud native. Utilizing these integration techniques can ease the pain of integration between the asset management system and the tools used to create.

Hybrid, on premise/cloud solutions will be around for the foreseeable future and, if anything, grow more prevalent before moving completely to the cloud. Companies that embrace remote postproduction workflows today will be ahead of the game when these workflows reach critical mass and it becomes practical for everyone – from individual users to giant corporations – to have media in the cloud. MAM implementation and deployment in the cloud is tricky, but living in the cloud gives you a great many benefits, including with your archive. Keeping your assets safe is a critical business function; for an organization that produces video and motion picture content, those assets often represent the majority of the intellectual property output of the company.

So why do many organizations let their intellectual property rot on spinning disks on a shelf? The answer is unfortunate – it’s easy, and there is a misconception that physical media is a safer long-term storage solution. The reality is physical storage on its own is not sufficient to protect these precious files. While LTO tape or optical storage might fit that bill today, one must think about the cost to refresh an archive as the technology treadmill leaves those options behind. These are the real costs of storing and archiving your material.

If your job relies on keeping media assets safe, making them searchable, and providing collaborative tools to deliver them, building the right ecosystem doesn’t have to be hard work. Building your workflows in a BeBop ecosystem allows you to be more fluid, flexible, collaborative, and even experimental. You will truly be able to create anywhere, anytime!

Below are some of our software partners and the integration methods they support: