Production Asset Management System

Production asset management systems (PAM) are most often tightly connected with MAM (media asset management), DAM (digital asset management) and VAM (video asset management). A confusing set of abbreviations for anyone who’s new to the expressions. However, to best describe a production asset management system would be a software that focuses on handling the editing process in a media file lifecycle.

Production asset management software increases the efficiency of your production environments via tools and features that manage and track media throughout the whole content creation process. It automates workflows and allows for tasks such as transcoding and media publishing, just to name a few, to be run in the background, allowing you to focus on creating new and intriguing content.

A production asset management software system is in other words a DAM software system intended specifically for production use, making it easier and more efficient in organizing, storing, controlling, finding and revising digital media assets. 

A production asset management system is designed for managing production workflows and keeping track of who’s working with each asset, and how they are working with it, often in digital media production where the assets are continuously changing such as films, video games or animation. 

You need a production asset management system when you make use of continually changing assets, and need a systematic way to catalogue the files you frequently need to edit and keep multiple versions of.

The different acronyms within asset management have throughout the years become increasingly blurred where you don’t know where one system ends, and another one starts. The “-AM” acronyms are quite often used interchangeably, sometimes even within the same sentence. Truth to be told: there is no universally accepted definition of the terms in any practical sense or relevancy.

The most commonly used term is DAM (digital asset management), as it’s often used as a general and all-encompassing term, including all asset management acronyms:

• MAM – Media Asset Management
• PAM – Production Asset Management
• BAM – Brand Asset Management
• VAM – Video Asset Management 

But in the end, they all do similar things. The general consensus is that DAM and MAM are concerned with the general life cycle of digital assets, most commonly video, audio and image files, and how they can be managed in the most efficient and organized manner. While PAM is typically used as a term to describe a specific subset of systems focused specifically on managing the whole production and editing process.

PAM, DAM, MAM – What do you need?

In the end, it doesn’t matter when hiring the services of Vidispine – we got it all covered whether you need a video production asset management system or a general media asset solution. All of them are integrated in Vidispine, making the decision less about picking a media asset management software over production asset management software, and instead about choosing a solution that will best benefit your unique business requirements and content creation needs.