5 Best Practices For Managing Video Files With DAM Tools

If there’s one type of content that’ll clearly dominate the decade, it’s, without a doubt, video. With the steady growth of video on Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube, as well as the impressive development pace of TikTok, it’s clear that more marketers have to film and share clips.

Although the hype video content generates is huge, creating and managing it comes with a ton of challenges. To start with, storing video clips takes up a ton of space. Other than that, before the clip is ready for publishing, there are a lot of drafts and versions - storing them separately makes a mess out of your file library.

To mitigate the challenges of managing video files, team managers use digital asset management tools – centralized platforms for organizing, managing, and sharing data.

In this post, we will focus on addressing the hurdles of video data organization and storage and discuss the best practices of organizing your company’s video content.

1. Create a unified metadata strategy

Before posting a video online, creators need to make sure the resolution, frame orientation, fps rate, and other specs comply with the platform’s criteria. Since there are a lot of platforms, the range of details to keep an eye on is enormous.

Here’s a short rundown on how clip settings range per platform:

If a team of creators wants to build a remarkable presence on all social media channels, there are a lot of things to keep track of. That’s where video metadata comes in handy.

By definition, metadata is information about other data. For video, the most common metadata fields are:

• Title
• Time of the shoot
• Resolution
• Aspect ratio
• Frame rate
• Size
• Creator
• Recording equipment used

Adding metadata fields to files using DAM saves teams a lot of time when looking for files. To make the most out of digital asset management platforms, make sure you build your team has a clear metadata management strategy.

Here are the ground rules our clients typically set for video creators:

• Use a defined vocabulary. Top-tier DAM tools (including Pics.io) allow managers to create a set of predefined terms to use when creating keywords. This small change helps foster order and promote consistency within the team.
• Use the rule of 5 Ws when creating new metadata. The Ws stand for “Who?”, “When?”, “Where?”, “What?”, and “Why?”. Although simple, these well-defined metadata tags are extremely helpful when locating files in your library.
• Choose a tool that captures metadata automatically. Top-of-the-league DAM tools do an excellent job of weeding basic metadata tags out of the file - you will not have to spend time entering file formats, file creating dates, and other technical specs.

2. Set distinct video previews

The next step toward making your video library as manageable as possible is to ensure that it’s easy to tell the difference between the videos your team uploads. One of the easiest and most effective ways to do it is by setting custom video thumbnails.

Pics.io, for example, allows creators and team managers to choose a specific frame of the video that will be set as a thumbnail. While our automatically generated previews are quite straightforward, customizing thumbnails saves a lot of time in the long run – you shouldn’t miss out on it.

3. Choose cloud-based DAM tools

Since video files take up a lot of storage choosing a cloud-based platform for file management is a sensible move. If your team is managing a lot of video assets, consider moving away from off-premises solutions and start exploring the benefits of the cloud.

Here are the most impactful advantages of switching to the cloud:

• Unlimited (or extensive) storage capacity. Pics.io, for one, works on top of Google Drive, so your team’s storage capacity depends on your Google Workspace subscription. Once you upgraded the account, the sky is the limit.
• Instant universal access to files – anyone on your team can access the storage anywhere, anytime.
• Safety and independence – you are no longer constrained by a single device and don’t have to worry that all files disappear if the gadget shuts down.
• On-demand scalability – cloud-based platforms allow business managers to expand and shrink the storage depending on how the number of uploaded assets fluctuates.

4. Attach timestamps to comments to manage production smoothly

Creating videos is a time-consuming process since there are a lot of creators involved. Scriptwriters, directors, editors, marketing managers, and other professionals on your team need to understand your vision and create content you will be proud of. So how can a business owner make sure his ideas come through clearly?

One of the ways to improve the efficiency of managing a video production agency is to leave clear, to-the-point edits. Make sure there’s a timestamp attached to each comment you make to avoid confusion.

Here’s an example of how our clients handle team communication in Pics.io:

Thanks to a timestamp, a simple comment is clear for the team, and there, likely, will be no questions asked.

5. Use version control to its fullest

Video creators are no strangers to struggling when navigating between drafts and iterations of a single clip. If you don’t manage versions carefully and don’t keep an eye on avoiding duplicates, there’s a high risk of making a mess in the library.

That’s why a lot of team managers look for platforms that support version control and linking assets.

Here’s how these features help video creators:

• Keep the file library duplicate-free.
• Make it easy to see all revisions and comments team members make.
• Allow comparing assets side-to-side to notice even incremental changes.
• Avoid naming confusion (yes, we are talking about draft1, draft11, draft11111).

Final Thoughts

Although there’s no way of telling what might come in the future, it’s clear that video content is here to stay. So, if you are still not betting on videos because it’s hard to store and manage them efficiently, there’s a powerful way out - using a video asset management platform.

By following the video management practices listed above, creators, team managers, and business owners will be able to easily find, comment on, and publish their work. Once your video library is well-organized, it’s much easier to bring new creative ideas to life and connect with new audiences.

To create an efficient and scalable video library give Pics.io a try. Sign up for a demo or leave us an email – we are looking forward to working with your team.