Avid Technology Limited

Roger P Sacilotto, Jr

Shailendra Mathur

Martin S Doehring

Information about each of the media assets that contribute to a published media composition is needed to determine attribution and contractual terms for the composition as a whole. The generation of a hierarchical asset genealogy that includes information about each of the assets that contribute to a media composition provides a mechanism for recording the full asset contribution history of a composition. The information may include asset ownership, distribution rights, asset structure, talent, and editors involved in generating the asset. For time-based compositions, it may specify which portions of an asset contribute to the composition. A report generator generates asset reports from the asset genealogy without the need to access or read the original composition, which may be represented by a proprietary compositional data model corresponding to an editing applications used to create the composition.

Asset genealogy tracking in digital editing systems

Within a media production environment, multiple variants of a given media asset may be stored on various systems within the environment. The described production environment tracks whether a newly created asset is a variant of an original asset within the environment, and, if so, assigns it a linkage key that it shares with the original and any other variants of the original. When responding to an asset search request, responsive assets may include assets sharing a linkage key. These are assembled into an aggregate asset that is returned as a single asset among the search results. Aggregate assets include descriptive metadata copied from its constituent variants and shown in the search results to represent the asset within the search results. Using links within the aggregate asset, the application automatically retrieves a compatible variant of the selected asset, if one is present within the production environment.

Media asset aggregation in a multi-database environment

A media file indexing service involves maintaining a media file index in a location external to the media file itself. The index is built up incrementally as the media file is being captured or transferred to shared storage. Client systems receive raw messages with information as to the location within the media file of media elements within each media file portion after it is written to shared storage, or receive refined messages indicating changes to the media file without the associated location information. Clients may query the index maintained by the index service for specific media elements during file capture, enabling edit-while-capture workflows.

Format-independent media file indexing

A method and system is provided to avoid the duplicate storage and transfer of multimedia data in a playback device, thereby increasing system bandwidth and available playback memory. A multimedia composition describes an edited piece of audio and video multimedia data. The composition is created and transferred to a playback device. The composition is examined to determine whether the multimedia data referred to in the composition is already stored in the playback device. If the data is stored in the playback device, or in transit to the playback device, it is not transferred to the playback device.

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Saugus, MA, United States of America

Roger P Sacilotto, Jr