• Exports Avid Interplay metadata to make it widely available

• Ideal for facilities with large, historic, Avid Interplay databases, to reduce their size but keep the metadata accessible to production staff

• An export of the rich Interplay metadata makes it more accessible to users, since it’s open, transferable and greatly increases workflow options for production facilities

• Exported metadata can be backed up and the source Interplay version deleted, reducing the size of the Interplay database

• IMET offers improved Interplay performance benefits in terms of speed and stability

• IMET delivers new downstream operational and integration possibilities, exploiting the valuable Interplay metadata

IMET reduces the Avid Interplay database size

Avid Interplay PAM has become a mainstay of many production workflows, relied upon daily by large and small production facilities around the world to find, track, archive and deliver projects. The Interplay Metadata Export Tool (IMET) copies and externalises Interplay metadata, making it searchable via a browser interface by operational staff. Importantly, the source externalised metadata record in Interplay can be safely deleted, thus reducing the size of the Interplay database and thereby improving the system's performance, stability and indexing speed.

Fully-searchable metadata

IMET works alongside the regular archiving process, exporting metadata so it's fully-searchable via a browser. This is useful when Interplay is getting full and needs archiving, yet you still want to be able to access important metadata. IMET will display a list of projects that you can open to see information such as headframes, AAF sequences and assets (master clips, sub clips, etc.), along with the metadata for each asset. Customers can search across projects, assets or any special fields, and can even download the AAF sequences and put back into Avid Media Composer if required.

Why might you need to keep metadata?

Many customers have been using Interplay for years and have been actively managing the media on their Avid NEXIS® or ISIS® storage, usually archiving media after use. However, for very good reasons, they have intentionally not archived or deleted the Interplay metadata associated with project media that has been archived. Users may want to keep the rich set of Interplay metadata available for later operational and production use – for example, searching and referencing the metadata to recover referenced media from an archive. The scale of the Interplay database can grow exponentially, ultimately adversely impacting Interplay performance.

How does IMET work from the user's perspective?

IMET is simple in concept and operation. When a user wants to export metadata from Interplay, they just drag that project or folder to an Interplay watch folder. From there, a data extraction service picks it up, extracts the structure, metadata, sequence AAFs and header frames for all master-clips, sub-clips, group-clips and sequences, and creates a set of folders that contain the data wrapped in JSON files. A standard web server is pointed at this folder structure and delivers a simple web UI in a browser to any users who have the right to access this.

Users simply drag and drop the project in Interplay and, soon after, it appears in their web browser. Here, they can navigate the folders, project, media descriptions and metadata, and see head frames in a very familiar way, searching and browsing from any location that can see the web server. Once exported, the user could choose to delete the information from Interplay, thereby reducing the number of assets held in the database.