CLIENT
2002
year of foundation
2000
hours of content in the library
aMedia was founded in 2002. Today, the company is the largest producer of television series and the largest private film studio in Russia. Its series regularly attract over 7 million viewers, with programming sold to over 25 countries, and the company has won numerous Russian Broadcasting Academy awards.
CHALLENGE
aMedia is a major force in Russian television and film production, having consistently produced successful programming for all the country’s leading channels. To maintain its competitive position, however, the company had to battle with time-consuming manual data entry processes such as printing and distributing paper copies of scripts and other materials.
Scriptwriters faced numerous obstacles to effective collaboration. Without an effective electronic archive, access to documents and video files was slow and limited. With financial issues associated with a number of projects, aMedia sought an innovative technical solution to increase its profitability. To raise the company’s operational efficiency, aMedia needed a robust platform to manage its rich media content.
SOLUTION
In 2006, we began developing a repository based on the EMC Documentum platform to allow aMedia to cost-effectively manage rich media content and seamlessly archive and retrieve broadcast files and footage. Unstructured textual content and compressed media data were stored using Documentum Content Server.
Bibliographic information was stored in a relational database, and can be accessed through the repository interface. The repository allowed the creation of separate, tree-structured document folders, and supports all document versions. The documents’ location in the repository is determined automatically on the basis of document field data.
The capability to load documents into the repository directly from MS Office applications was also introduced. Collaborative work can be performed on documents using a check-in/check-out mechanism.
The repository was next integrated with a script editing application developed on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, using Java technology. Plain text input mode offers automatic structurisation, so that ‘teaser’ copy, reports, scenes, individual characters and dialogue can be isolated to create, for instance, promotional material.
When a scriptwriter introduces unstructured text, it is automatically analysed and sorted according to the objects, characters and format contained within it. Changes to script structure can also be made at a later date, to support a miniseries format, for example.
RESULTS
Covering more than 200 workplaces, our solution was the largest and most ambitious systems development and integration project using the EMC Documentum platform ever undertaken in Russia. aMedia benefited from a robust platform for managing its rich media content, with the repository capable of storing 40,000 documents in English, Russian or both, with search capability in either language.
In real-time mode, the repository can be accessed by thousands of users simultaneously. The speed and quality of collaborative work has been greatly enhanced, while user access rights to stored documents can now be set by administrators, improving document security.
The script editing application module meets all the requirements of aMedia’s scriptwriting and product placement department. Integrated with the repository, the module enables simultaneous and secure scriptwriting to take place, the import and export of scripts for editing outside the client’s local network; and read-only status for exported scripts. The module enables remote, collaborative script work to be coordinated at aMedia by an authorised manager.
TECHNOLOGIES
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EMC Documentum,
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Server R2, MS SQL,
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EMC Documentum MTS,
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AVTS,
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WSF,
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DA,
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WT,
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Tomcat on Java,
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SSO integration,
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Eclipse RCP, Eclipse IDE.