A few weeks ago I was invited by David Peach onto a local radio show to discuss photography and digital asset management along with fellow professional photographer Eden Connell. We discussed many topics including DAM best practise and protecting photographers rights. Here’s a recording from the show.
Episode One [51:04]: A basic overview of Digital Asset Management, why it’s important and how photographers use it. The follow up episode will be posted soon where we discuss specific programs you can use for DAM.
Automated transcript:
And also in the studio this morning with me are a couple of photographers. One is Eden Connell from Zoom In With Eden, and Robert Edwards. Now, we’re going to talk about a topic called Digital Asset Management, but let me tell you about these guys first.
Robert is an accredited and qualified corporate photographer and video producer, past National President of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography, with 20 years of experience, and has given keynote presentations at the Digital Show Australia, and runs photography workshops right around Australia. His passion for digital photography started back when Kodak Digital SLRs cost $60,000. Holy cow, that must have been a while ago, Rob. That’s all of one megapixel, too, for that. Oh, my Lord. I remember a couple of years ago, I had a Sony, or not a couple of years ago, my first digital camera was a Sony Mavica that actually took a diskette in the back of it. It was a big three and a half inch format camera. Well, format’s probably the wrong word, but it was dreadful. I don’t even think it was one megapixel, it was like half a megapixel. That’s right. But it was quite an experience.
And Eden joins us. Now, you’re a, sorry, Edward, Robert, you’re a local, but your studio’s in North Sydney? That’s right. And Eden has joined us. His studio’s in Brookvale. So there’s a couple of local boys this morning. Eden, do you want to tell us a little bit about you? Yeah, pretty much. Oh, hang on, let me get your mic running here. Try now. Here we go, testing. How are you guys? Yeah, I run a business Zoom In With Eden Photography on the northern beaches, and we basically get out everywhere and shoot everything we can. With a camera, right? With a camera. Right.
Okay, so we’re going to be talking this morning about digital asset management. I talked a little bit about it at the beginning of the program. You know, everyone carries a smartphone now, and every smartphone’s a camera, and it’s got this exploding library of imagery that’s around them. I, in my professional practice, talk to a lot of creative studios, and all of them talk to me about how do we manage the vast majority or the vast collections of media that they’ve amassed over time. And I’ve got one, a video editing company of mine, has 50 terabytes of video under management. And I think they film concerts at the Enmore and things like that, and they have, I think, 2,500 concerts in their back catalogue. And it’s just an enormous amount of video. How do you safeguard it? How do you protect it? How do you back it up? How do you catalogue it? Find the thing you’re looking for in a hurry? So this whole category of digital asset management, I think, is getting bigger.
Would that be fair? I think it’s always been big. It’s just what I find is people don’t contact me for advice until something bites them, like they’ve lost footage or files or photos. And then we have a look at their whole system and can see where all the holes are that things have fallen through, rethink the plan and see what they can do to fix it. Now, is DAM or digital asset management a… is that sort of lexicon in people’s common thinking or is this something limited to photography? Ask Eden. Well, we all need to back up stuff. I’ve been burnt before with a drive, so when it comes down to it, yeah.
I have another photography client, you guys may know, Milk and Honey over in Balmain. And Annie there called me one day out of the blue and said, you know, yikes. And I went over there and I looked at the amount of stuff that she had under management and I thought, wow, this actually needs to… there must be some guidelines out there about how to manage this problem. And the more I looked, the more I found there’s the DAM book, which actually led me to your site, Robert. But there’s an alarming lack of, you know, common knowledge about this. And I see it all the time with people, you know, their filing systems for data structuring and things like that are kind of scary.
I think it’s unfortunate if you start talking about digital asset management, it’s like talking superannuation to young kids. Okay, so we’re all over 40 here, so I think we understand that analogy. It doesn’t affect me, it’s got nothing to do with me, particularly if you’re talking about smartphones. So apart from businesses, there’s consumers just generating so much data, photos, videos, and it’s just going up in the cloud and they think that’s fine. So that’s probably another tangent we might go on. It’s not known until people do get to that size of company you’re talking about, like Milk and Honey with Annie, or the video clients.
When you’re dealing with a lot of images or video that has very high commercial value and resale value, then you want to protect it. Right. Yeah, because for you guys particularly, it’s your intellectual property, isn’t it? I mean, it’s your stock in trade. Totally. Like I had a client the other day that rang me and it was a shoot two years ago and they said, oh, we’ve lost all the images. Is there a chance you can get them for us? Because I keep a really good archive of the images, I said, no problems.
So we need to do that. Wow, okay. So how many people keep a really good archive of images? I mean, I expect professional photographers like you guys to do it. To me, it’s kind of just a given. But time and time again, when I go into other businesses, and Annie is not in this example, but I’ve been to lots and lots of businesses where this stuff is just scattered across hard drives, there’s no catalogs, no one knows where to find things. And if you say, oh, I need to go and find image X, there’s just no way.
There’s no way they can do it other than sit there and laboriously rifle through drives. And I’ve also seen people find image X and three or four versions of it, which is the real version with digital, with film, we had no problem. There’s the original. Where’s the base image and then all the corrected ones after that? And I don’t want to throw any of them away because I don’t know which one it is. So then we’re multiplying it by however many versions of it they have.
Yeah, and then if you start backing it up to different devices, you may have four different images on three different devices. Which one is the most current? So that’s the nature of the problem. I mean, there’s this growing puddle of data that we all have to manage. And the reason I asked you guys in particular, because I think photographers are probably on the steep end of the learning curve here on this.
They had some fantastic hosting plans and things like that. If you’ve ever had to move large chunks of data across the Pacific, it’s just appalling. The client I was talking about before that has 50 terabytes of data, if they film in L.A. or a New York concert or something like that, and they’re getting their off-camera masters about 130 gig, they have to come across in one clean lump because if the file gets corrupted in transit, it’s unreadable.
We were using a service called Aspera, A-S-P-E-R-A, which is an accelerated file transfer thing, and it moves this lump of data very, very quickly, but it’s wildly expensive. If you were putting Aspera server in as the host end, it’s beyond the reach of most small businesses. Thankfully, they were just installing the client locally and pulling the data from a U.S. server, so it was no big deal, but it actually made the transfer quite quick.
But then they have all these 130 gig masters, and so they’re right back to this issue of, okay, we’ve got them here. They were storing them internally on a whole bunch of DROBOs. Now, for the non-photographers in the room, a DROBO is a device which I think is as great as a come-and-go storage thing, but it’s, again, not an area that I would put any long-term storage on. DROBO stands for Data Robotics. It’s a great device and allows you to, if you’ve got five disks of varying sizes and capacities and formats, build a dynamic RAID array across all five disks on the fly. If one of them falls over, you pull the drive out, pop another one in of whatever you happen to have lying around, and it works it out.
Very, very clever, but not the fastest storage in town, and these guys were trying to edit off DROBOs as well, and it was just not working. Was it the latest DROBOs? Because actually, I use them, I edit directly. My source drive is a DROBO. Do you? Yeah, yeah. I think for stills it’s probably okay. I edit video on DROBO as well. Thunderbolt is the new interface. Yeah, with Thunderbolt it’s going to be a whole lot better. It’s out there now, and it works quite well, but I understand I had external SATA, eSATA, and editors would come in and use it and they’d just cry.
Yeah, I’ve never liked the eSATA. But it’s funny, with DROBOs there’s positives and negatives, but the DROBO is a one-system, so if something happens then you’re in trouble. But I’ve backed that up myself by having two systems, two DROBOs. And here’s the thing, how many DROBOs is enough? The bigger your primary library, the more copies it gets harder to manage. If you’ve got a primary library on a DROBO of, what, 16, 20 terabytes or something like that, and you’ve got to back that up, there’s another 16 or 20 terabytes, and you want a third copy, and that’s got to be off-site, where are you going to park that other DROBO? It takes a while to do.
I use a thing called, I have a source DROBO and a backup DROBO, and I use a thing called SyncToy, and basically what it does is just sync between them both, and it takes to do a backup probably about an hour on them, it depends how much data we’ve gone through. Because SyncToy just does incremental changes between the two drives. But you’ve got to be smart with it. You’re such a nerd. We like the nerdy stuff.
But there’s QNAP as well, they’ve got some really good systems. Yeah, I just installed a QNAP at a client, I love them. They are such a great device. A QNAP is, I mean, the one I put in was a 419, and it builds a RAID array across four drives. We put in three, sorry, four 3-terabyte drives, and these guys have got a mile of storage, and it’s very, very quick, and the whole unit, I think, all up installs about $1,500. You know, fully populated with great drives.
I actually find them, to me, they feel better than the DROBOs. My experience with DROBOs has been, and maybe I’ve just had a bad experience, but it has not been A, they’re not fast, or not fast enough, and B, not stable enough. But the only clients where I’ve been working with them have had video, not stills. This other company that I was talking about before, they’ve now put in a thing called a Terablock, and that has a 12-terabyte RAID in it, and it’s basically a Windows server that runs, and its only purpose is to deliver high-speed video.
It’s got a pair of 100-gigabit Ethernet ports on it. We’ve built them a special 100-gig network, because they’ve got four video editors running off this one device. One guy, they’ll get a new concert in, they’ve got to do demo reels, they’ve got to do promotional stuff, they’ve got to do the final edits, they’ve got to do the low-res edits, all these things, before they push it out to the content networks, and they might have to produce four different formats of the thing as well.
We’ll have to wait till the SSD drives get bigger and bigger. We use, in our studio, SSD drives, and we edit with them all the time, but we’re doing still, so it’s easy. Then we can export into the Drobo. So coming back to the 3-2-1 model, can you walk us through that, Rowan?
With cloud storage, that’s why I’ve written down that crash plan, I’m going to go, when I get back to the studio, I’m going to go back home and have a look at it. The problem with cloud, as you mentioned, we can’t push it. I need to actually say crash plan are not a sponsor of this station. Imagine Eden’s got quite a few terabytes of images, and if you need to upload that, it could seriously take over a year to upload that to the US, but the advantage is if you can ship them a hard drive, in the US that’s what colleagues do, you ship them a hard drive, and they’re not expensive, and then either ship them back or they keep them, and then they’ll upload them straight to their server there.
The same thing, if your computer and your Drobo or your QNAP dies, and you don’t want to sit there for a year and download everything, you can ship a drive back to it. So I’ll definitely be looking for that as another option. So 3-2-1 is you want your images, your files, or your Illustrator files, whatever you’re creating, in three different formats, or you want at least three copies of it, so that’s the three.
Someone’s just texted me and said, yeah, QNAP, open file system. So you want three copies of everything that you have. You want in two different formats, so if you have got it on a hard drive, another hard drive is not another different format. If you want a hard drive or Blu-ray or cloud storage, whatever it is, but not exactly the same as the one you’ve got it in, and one of those should be off-site, so that’s the one.
So if your house burns down – I think it’s still true today. David, if you’re – I mean, I hope it never happens. If your house is burning down, what’s one of the first things you grab besides your MacBook? Nothing else matters. No, I guess I would go for insurance policies and photographs and things like that, but of course they’re all digital.
I know now everything’s backed up and it’s done. It’s easy. It starts with a file name. That’s the gateway, and then it’s all. What about number two? What do we do next? I would say don’t go to Officeworks and buy 50 different drives. Go and speak to people. Find out how they’re backing up, what they’re doing. I know at the moment now I’ve got seven terabytes of data that’s backed up all the time, and that’s growing at a really fast rate. So just speak to people.
Can you put our details on your Facebook page as well? Yes, of course. You guys can contact us as well. You can tell your website’s on there as well. Yeah, great. Zoom in with eden.com. If you want to find Robert, just www.photographer.com.au. He thought about that one. What a site, eh? Seriously, cool URL. Photographer.com.au. Yes. And that will have a link to your damn simple one as well. It’s got a blog there, which being a geek, I blog about this stuff and point people to resources, latest thinking on digital asset management, and also you’ll find a link to workshops that I run on this as well as other photography people get into it.
So you do the workshops here in Sydney? I do all around Australia. So we pick a venue, whether it’s a hotel or a studio. Typically it’s a photographic studio. Right. So you get a whole bunch of photographic nerds in there. Yeah, or people crying because they’ve lost everything. Yeah. I guess, yeah, if do it is point number one, point number half should be don’t wait till you have an accident. No. But that’s the thing. Everyone thinks they won’t have an accident. It happened to me. I took a year off to travel, came back. One of my Western Digital drives plugged it in. It fried itself. Oh, no. $600 later, I got the data. I would have paid $5,000 for it. It’s just data, it’s worth every cent.
I’ve had a number of clients over the years who have had exactly that scenario, but not so much with photographic data but with business data, not backed up properly. And then by the time it goes to a data recovery specialist who will take the drive and disassemble it in a clean room environment, they’ve got you by the shorts and they are going to charge. Most of them will charge you $800 to $1,000 just to quote. Most people get that number and go, oh, forget it. It’s not worth it. So they have to charge that up front. It’s almost like a non-refundable quoting fee. And then they say, well, depending on how much data we can get back. I don’t know how reputable that industry is because I kind of feel like they look at you and they think, well, how much money? What’s it worth doing?
There are a couple of people that I use, and I understand what you’re saying, and this only happened a few weeks ago, to a Drobo. So you got a text from someone saying, yay, QNAP, open source. So Drobo is a closed source. Yes, it is. It’s based on RAID. It’s its own proprietary implementation of RAID, yeah. And it was a Drobo that crashed. And it was quite a good company, North Sydney, that was able to do it. But they quoted $1,500 to look at it. And what you get back is just folders and folders of generic file names and depending on what it is. Okay, so you’ve got to go back through and try and do the… And these were all movies. So they decided in the end what was on there. And now, of course, it’s got back up. It must have been bitten. And they decided it wasn’t worth it.
Couldn’t you get another Drobo device, put all the drives in and re… No, it had been corrupted. And these were the old Drobos. You’ve mentioned before, David, that you’re a bit… The four bays, yeah. So Drobo has been sold off to a different company now. The inventor has gone on to invent another product. Right, okay. And his own version… This is why I get you guys in because you’re more across this than I… The new Drobos are built with a higher quality manufacturing, not the old ones that are that bad, just things like Thunderbolt. So it transfers data so fast that you can edit video on it.
Yeah, so I take it you’re a Mac guy then? I am, yes. And I’m PC, so we’re fighting each other here now. But then the QNAP will work fine on PC. I’m very – I try to be platform agnostic, so I use Windows as well. I’ve just – I prefer Mac. Likewise, although I’m quite conversant with both platforms. The one I use day-to-day is a Mac. I just find it’s – to me it feels more like I can attach it to almost anything and it can read and write almost anything. It’s kind of like the four-wheel drive of computers. I’ve just had a Mac crash on me as well, so I had to rebuild that. It does happen. I’ve looked at computers, any computer. It was a corrupted file system.
Anyway, we can talk about the pros of Mac versus PC. But back on the backup solution as well, data storage is extremely cheap these days. So I recommend as well if you’re not sure of your data storage solution, go to Officeworks or wherever and actually instead of buying one drive, buy two and just do an incremental backup. Hang on a second, you just said don’t buy five. Don’t buy five, don’t buy five. But what I’m saying is if you go there, buy two drives because it’s so cheap. If you’re not sure on what you’re doing, the main thing is just do a backup. Get a copy.
If you’re after resources, both Ed and I are members of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography so we represent photographers and videographers more recently. So helping each other, it’s a voluntary run organisation with a few paid professionals, AIPP.com.au. But can just Joe Public or any other business operator go to there? If you’re creative, there are three levels of membership so you can be a consumer or an amateur and it’s a bit like Friends of the Zoo. Right. Very controversial with AIPP members but it’s to hang around the pros and look at some of these workshops.
I’ve got clients who back up to tape but you’ve also got to test that. So the recall fee of a tape is about $300 I think you’d be looking at just to see if you can recall. So if you’ve deleted something but you’ve got it back off site with tape, that is an option for much bigger corporations. Okay, guys. Well, look, thanks for coming in this morning. I think it’s been a great discussion. I’ve really enjoyed having you both here. Eden Connell from Zoom In with Eden and Robert Edwards from www.photographer.com.au. So thanks, guys. Thank you and don’t forget to back up, guys. Go out and get those drives. Just do us. Make it happen. Thank you, Dave. Make it happen. Thank you, Dave.