A Better Way to Organize Your Media

Last Friday, I had lunch with Sam Bogoch, CEO, and Colin Anderson, U.S. Business Manager, both of Axle Video. I’ve been a fan of their Media Asset Management system for a while and I wanted to catch up on the latest news.

The big news, from Axle’s point of view, was their announcement last week that “axle Starter, a new entry-level version of its flagship media management software, is now included with all configurations of the industry-leading Avid NEXIS|PRO software-defined storage platform from Avid.” [Axle Video Press Release]

As Sam explained: “axle Video takes a unique, radically simple approach to media management, and axle Starter provides the simple, yet powerful capabilities customers need to take full advantage of the value delivered by their Avid NEXIS|PRO storage.”

Axle’s bundle with Avid is good news, but the bigger news for me was the existence of axle Starter in the first place. Let me explain why.

Managing our media is already a headache for many of us and, with the explosive proliferation of video, it’s only going to get worse. Just as an illustration, at lunch, Sam told me the story of a US network that spent two million dollars a few years ago on a media asset management system just so their editors could find B-roll clips more easily!

Today, digital photography makes generating new media dead easy, yet finding it later is darn near impossible. Too many clips with the same name stored in a folder structure that doesn’t make sense, and no way to attach any text that describes what the clips are about.

That’s where a media asset management system (MAM) can help. Truthfully, there are many ways we can manage media: from rigorous clip organization in the Finder to applications that cost thousands of dollars. However, for small workgroups on a limited budget, there are not a lot of good options.

This is what pleased me so much about Axle Starter: it only costs $495, supports up to 2 simultaneous users and installs easily on an office network using, for example, a medium-powered Mac Mini.

As Axle describes it on their website:

“axle Starter is a new entry-level edition of our radically simple media management software, making it easy for anyone to manage their media from any computer on their network. Like axle 2016, axle Starter creates proxies of your media, allows you to view, tag, search, share, and organize your media, and offers a simple workflow for getting media from axle to Adobe Premiere Pro or Apple Final Cut Pro, without needing to move media around.

“There are some limitations [to axle Starter] to keep in mind:

• Maximum of two users
• Maximum of three active sessions
• Maximum of 300,000 assets in the database
• No upload or download functionality
• Does not include axle Cam
• Upgrade options are available starting at $800″

By the way, axle Starter includes a very useful Adobe Premiere Pro panel that allows you to browse all the media tracked in Axle from within Premiere.

I purchased the full version of axle for my company when we moved over to video last year and, in a few weeks, I’ll write a review of the latest version of their software.

For now, if you are looking for a way to keep track of your assets that allows you room to grow, yet won’t break the bank, you might want to look into axle Starter. Upgrading to the full version is simply a matter of licensing and doesn’t require you to change anything that you have already stored in the system. A demo version of the software is available for you to experiment with.