Managing and Organising Assets

Actor runs an integral database that is installed with Compere, to manage all timeline assets. This Apache CouchDB component is installed and runs as a service on each Actor server. The database runs on a peer-to-peer architecture, distributed to all devices running the Asset Logistics app, which manages the database and its contents.

This is a highly flexible and resilient-to-failure architecture.

Assets are introduced into Compere systems by ingest from named ‘watched’ locations into secure, controlled locations ‘vaults’ on devices. Locations and numbers of vaults is determined by the user for optimal performance and ease of use. For example, in a small system one vault on one server may be enough. However, where large media is divided into sections, local vaults per section server will be faster. For very large media, a networked storage solution might be an appropriate ingest point, distributing assets to multiple server vaults only as locally required for each section.

Assets placed in watched locations are detected by the Asset Logistics application. As they are being ingested, they are recorded in the database with the assets’ implicit properties, plus additional (editable) metadata, and moved out of the watched location into selectable locations from where they can be accessed to deploy on timelines.

Watched locations are then left empty.

Any Actor device can be used to ingest assets. Distribution amongst servers is handled by an FTP server installed with Compere.

Assets include anything that might be required on a timeline, such as video, audio, shaders, maps, Notch blocks, mesh models and so on.

For a complete, and more technical explanation of the Asset Logistics application, and managing assets in Compere, see the separate user guide which describes the ingest process and using database tagging for sectioned media, destination locations and distribution. This guide describes the content and use of the Asset Management panel for populating timelines.

➢M860 Managing Assets in Compere

Page edited [d/m/y]: 14/12/2023