Ok, so I have tons of videos, photographs, sound files, Flash files, photoshop files and God knows what other type of files.

I need to organize all of them for easy lookup, so I started researching and found that what I need is a DAM (no kidding) solution. DAM stands for Digital Asset Management system and they range from the simple and cheap (iView Media Pro) to the real expensive ones like Alienware (which are multi-user systems).

After careful research and analysis I came to the conclusion that a one user system was the way to go (ok, so actually my boss made me come to that conclusion by saying that we can’t afford a full multi-user system now).

After exensive research (a.k.a. Google searching) I narrowed my testing to 2 solutions.

#1 - iView Media Pro (http://www.iview-multimedia.com/)
#2 - MediaDex (http://www.mediadex.com/us/index.htm)

Although I did not do an extensive test on both, I found iView Media Pro to be the most intuitive and user friendly of both products.

They both allow you to easily add media to their catalogs, though I think there is more meta data in iView Media Pro then there is in MediaDex.

The both sucked when it came to speed. I saved their catalogs in a central server (over LAN) and then pulled video over LAN and it took a long time to get the media in there (MediaDex hung up a couple of times).

I ended up choosing iViewMediaPro because of the UI and it seems to handle a larger variety of media types versus MediaDex.

The only drawback to iView Media Pro was that if you open the catalog on the Mac but you added the files on a Windows machine, all the links to the files will be broken due to the way a Mac maps network drives is different then the way a PC does (\\servername\sharepoint\file vs mounteddrive\file). So, for example, if I added a file on the Windows side that pointed to \\myserver\mysharepoint\folder\file.avi and then I went to my Mac and tried to load that catalog and look at that file, I would get a broken link because my Mac would see that file as MyDrive\folder\file.avi.

If you are not on a multi-platform environment, then you should be ok.

The other alternative for a DAM is Adobe Bridge. If you have any current Adobe applications (Photoshop, Flash, Premiere Pro, etc. then you should have that). I don’t personally like it. I don’t like the UI, I don’t like the speed of it, I just don’t like it.

Anyhow. I hope this article helped some of you and if you know of any other great DAM software (I love saying DAM every other word), please email me at marcelo@thedigitalmediadude.com. I’m very interested in finding out about other DAM (see what I mean?) alternatives that are low cost.

Cheers!

Marcelo Lewin

The Digital Media Dude