Five new products help media and entertainment content creators.  

Every industry is coping with an explosion in digital assets as it becomes both more important and easier to create and save content. The media and entertainment industry is no different. Digital asset management software provider Southpaw Technology today releases five new applications that extend its open source platform Tactic, to improve the process of working with digital assets across a wide range of locations and software platforms.

Three of the products were pre-announced at Siggraph 2014 last month, but two others (Tactic Brand Manager and Tactic Media Library) have been added to today’s launch. All new product are accessible on Windows, OS X, iOS, Linux, and Android.  The cloud versions of some products are designed for Amazon Web Services.

The five new additions to Tactic are:

Tactic VFX: (On-cloud or on-premise) An app that offers several management features for asset, shot, and sequence management of digital special effects. Southpaw says the app provides full review and approval pipelines, as well as reference and reusable asset libraries that can be exchanged between managed departments and groups. Southpaw considers this a “best practices” solution based on its work with existing customers.

Tactic aSync: (on-premise only) This app extends the data management layer of Tactic to allow globally distributed companies to work on and share assets in real-time without a central cloud repository. By transmitting data and information instantly and asynchronously, aSync ensures all data and all transactions made on it are up to date and consistent, no matter where in the world (or in what time zone) that data is worked on or stored.

Tactic ServerAssist: (on-premise only) This app searches all local storage to find lost or “ownerless” assets, to make them accessible for editing, versioning, and applying controls to related metadata.

Tactic Brand Manager: (On-cloud or on-premise): This app provides marketing teams with a cross-platform solution for managing brand, image and content across campaigns, from any location. It ships with a default pipeline (set of steps) to move assets through an approval process; offers a jobs module (including GANTT charts) to help teams plan and track asset use; and offers a dashboard that provides at-a-glance status reports on all campaigns and related assets. There is also an API to allow connections to products like Salesforce.com.

Tactic Media Library: (On-cloud or on-premise): A central, searchable and secure repository for every asset a company creates, Media Library allows users to ingest, organize, manage, and distribute assets across their company or across the globe. It includes search capabilities, administrative controls, and tagging. The interface is customizable.

What do we think?

Southpaw has observed and learned from best practices in use at many customer sites, but it seems no two M&E companies manage assets exactly the same way. Southpaw is doing the industry a service by trying to extend the reach of the best practices it observes, while continuing to offer flexibility through customization and a choice of apps.