Hey MAM, where's my media? Handling the VR media mess.

So you've shot your material, got it labeled correctly and transferred to disk on location, what next? Well you hope to get it into post for stitching and editing. But what happens when you get into the post production pipeline? How do you make sure you can find everything?

Normally there will be at least seven streams per shot multiplied by however many shots you did. Hopefully someone annotated all the material as to what is what and where, but what is the best process for doing this? There is a lot of metadata that needs to be collated and organised for each camera and then dropped into a collection for each camera within a shot.

When working with a GoPro rig, there is very little metadata actually generated automatically for you so some form of manual entry into a database needs to be done. You could do a custom database solution using Access or FileMaker, but these would then need custom queries to be built to sort the fields required. So a dedicated video MAM that understands what the necessary metadata could be, with predefined fields, but with the flexibility to add more dedicated fields specific to your production pipeline is the best option. So what offerings are out there that won't break the bank? Well one I'd recommend is CatDV from Square Box software as it's reasonably priced, cross platform and easily customised. If the budget allows there is a server option that allows data to be captured from client workstations either in the field or at your post facility. CatDV can even create thumbnails and proxies if need be. A MAM can not only hold your media metadata but also documents, photos and other production materials you wish to capture.

Another benefit of using a MAM is that it can be automated to archive your material for you, I'll talk about backup and archiving another time, exploiting plugins available off the shelf to common backup/archive solutions.

The final reason for a MAM is that it can reference your source material to your final output from where it is archived, be it to tape or spinning disk.

So before embarking on a shoot remember you'll need to wrangle a lot of media before you can post. As always with any type of production, planning is half the battle.