Metadata: What You Need to Know (And Why You Need to Know It)

Adobe Story
Adobe Story is one example of repurposed metadata that seems likely to succeed where similar products from Avid and other editing-only solutions have failed. Offered as an online service, Adobe Story takes a holistic view on script development as one of the keys to production and postproduction, using the act of script creation as a way to mask a powerful underlying metadata repository.

Figure 5. Adobe Story, which is still in development

Story takes scripts, character bios, and synopsis information and "injects all this descriptive information into the production workflow," according to the company. The metadata can be used by other Adobe products, such as the company’s OnLocation laptop capture software, which uses the script information to automate a production shot list.

Beyond freeing up content creators from the monotony of creating production shots, the potential here is that Story also provides a link from preproduction metadata into the postproduction process.

Cognizant that the aspiring filmmaker may already have his or her script at least partially created in a desktop application (Story is available as an Adobe AIR application but is primarily an online service), the company has also provided a way to get Final Draft scripts and even Microsoft Word scripts in to Story.

"In our independent research, we found that more than 70% of aspiring filmmakers use Word to create their scripts," says Ginna Baldassarre, Adobe’s senior product manager, Production Premium. "Rather than making them retype their scripts into Story, which would stall the creative process, we chose to allow existing scripts created in Word to be imported directly into Story. From there Story converts the script into relevant metadata that would then flow into Adobe Production Premium, streamlining the video production workflow."

The end result, for those of us who aren’t planning to make a film but do want to find out detailed information about a particular scene or clip, is that this attention to detail during script writing begins to translate into assets that are easier to search and find, without having to spend hours retyping metadata after the fact.