How CHESA Simplifies Media Workflows and Empowers Creatives with Acorn Cloud

By Lance Hukill, Chief Commercial Officer – CHESA
By Kenny Rajan and Jonathan Solomon, Sr. Solutions Architects – AWS
By Sujoy Dey, Sr. Customer Solutions Manager – AWS

CHESA

There is growing adoption of modern solutions that can help creatives spend more time creating content rather than managing infrastructure due to unprecedented audience demand for new content.

Whether it’s individuals from media and entertainment or cross-industry marketing teams, creatives have to deal with a large volume of media assets and secure access to valuable media assets. They face the recurring challenge of filtering content in order to collaborate efficiently—and all of this while meeting distribution guidelines and requirements.

To overcome these challenges, creatives are looking for reliable, intelligent, efficient, and affordable media asset management (MAM) and digital asset management (DAM) systems.

In addition to the basic functionality of indexing, metadata tagging, and searching, creatives need MAM and DAM systems that can touch every part of a project lifecycle, from pre- and post-production to transcode, review and approval, quality checks, distribution, remote proxy editing, and beyond.

In this post, we will see how organizations can use Acorn Cloud by AWS Select Tier Services Partner CHESA. Acorn Cloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) turnkey MAM solution powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that helps creatives to ingest, search, find, enrich, and retain their assets, all within a work-in-progress platform for Adobe Premiere Pro video editing software.

With Acorn, users can collaborate quickly, find and edit the assets they need, confirm they’re using the correct versions, facilitate storage management and retrieval of media files throughout the content lifecycle, and efficiently distribute them across various channels. This includes a native integration to Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), one of the leading DAM platforms.

MAM and DAM Value Proposition

Typically, MAM refers to the techniques and solutions creative teams use to manage video recordings, audio files, and other multimedia assets. MAM helps creatives to manage the storage, organization, and collaboration of multimedia files and their related metadata. In addition, MAMs are a key integration point with other components of the media workflow, such as transcode, editing, scheduling, and distribution.

In most cases, MAMs are geared more for users who just have video content and rich media to administer and manage. For cross-functional teams who want to manage videos and other types of assets, they can tap into DAM solutions to manage all file types and aren’t limited to video and rich media files. DAMs have innovative features to support many different types of brand collateral.

Acorn Cloud and DAM solutions such as Adobe Experience Manager can help companies monetize their content by providing insights, securing access to valuable media assets, optimizing their storage costs by managing lifecycle rules for content based on demand, and creating seamless integrations with cross-platform solutions.

An off-the-shelf MAM system is a great option for customers who don’t have the time, developer resources, or budget to build a custom solution themselves. Acorn Cloud is a full solution stack that can be quickly deployed as a SaaS platform powered by secure, reliable object storage such Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to house media files, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for web access, and fully managed purpose-built AWS databases to store metadata.

What is Acorn Cloud?

As industry veterans for two decades, CHESA observed a need for a solution that could provide what creative teams need—a complete turnkey SaaS platform backed by expert support.

Acorn Cloud is fully managed SaaS platform that lowers the barrier of entry for creatives to access collaboration tools for their remote teams to create, edit, and deliver video content. With Acorn Cloud, creatives have the ability to collaborate remotely using their cloud-based platform. It gives editors the ability to ingest, search, find, enrich, and retain their assets.

Built for teams that need agility but lack IT support, Acorn comes fully supported so creative teams can get started and stay up and running, focusing on collaboration and on-time delivery.

Figure 1 – Collaborate and manage media with Acorn Cloud.

Acorn Cloud is a highly resilient platform with multi-factor authentication (MFA) features for secure access. The platform enables video editorial teams to collaborate seamlessly to ensure technology doesn’t get in the way.

Acorn provides creative tools for bulk media ingest backed by scalable cloud storage, including drag-and-drop ingest with camera card support, live edit review and edit proxies, leveraging web user interface (UI) to scrub proxies without opening an asset.

It has a logging feature to record tags about each scene as virtual clips, workflow orchestration, extended metadata support to enrich user content, and intuitive search features allowing users to retrieve and repurpose archived content.

Acorn also includes comprehensive documentation and training video library, intuitive UI, functionality to rapidly onboard for full MAM functionality, and monitoring capabilities. It includes a white-glove service level agreement.

Acorn Cloud keeps creatives focused on creativity, while CHESA manages, hosts, and services the platform. It’s secure and resilient while also protecting your valuable assets.

Benefits of Having Acorn on AWS

• Agility: AWS is designed to allow application providers, ISVs, and vendors to quickly and securely host applications—whether an existing application or a new SaaS-based application. AWS gives CHESA the agility to quickly spin up new instances, and the ability to try out new services without investing in large upfront, sunk costs (costs that have already been incurred and can’t be recovered).
• Reliability: By powering Acorn Cloud with AWS, CHESA takes advantage of a scalable, reliable, and secure global cloud infrastructure.
• Scalable and high-performance: Using tools like AWS Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, CHESA can scale up or down the Acorn Cloud based on demand. Backed by AWS infrastructure, CHESA can have access to compute and storage resources when you need them.

Next-Generation DAM with Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a comprehensive content management solution for building websites, creating digital forms, and managing marketing assets.

Adobe Experience Manager Assets is a component of the solution that’s a cloud-native DAM built for today’s content needs, letting you easily manage thousands of assets to create, manage, deliver, and optimize personalized experiences at scale.

AEM provides a next-generation DAM with featured benefits such as:

• Reimagined DAM which enhances customer experience by combining the scalability of the cloud and the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver personalized content at scale.
• Native integration with Adobe’s Creative Cloud tools such as Adobe Premiere Pro to eliminate email-driven workflows and make collaboration faster. It lets creatives work directly in Creative Cloud applications while marketers easily give feedback and direction, all through the DAM directly.
• Streamlined tagging, cropping, and distribution using AI-based asset intelligence.
• Increased content velocity to meet customer demands easily by rapidly composing, adapting, and delivering variations of content across devices and channels.
• Maximized value and reduced costs by ensuring digital assets are built, reviewed, approved, and automatically tagged to their associated project using standardize processes and simplified operations (single view of status/tasks, standardized briefs) with the Adobe Workfront integration.

Adopting AWS for running Adobe Experience Manager creates an environment for business agility, flexibility, and reduced costs. See additional AWS documentation to learn about running AEM on AWS.

Acorn Cloud + Adobe Experience Manager

Whether your organization is using a MAM, DAM, or combination of these solutions, teams are ultimately looking for a reliable, scalable solutions that let creatives and administrators easily manage thousands of assets.

There are certain use cases where organizations can use a combination of these solutions. For example, a subset of asset and metadata can be published from a MAM to a DAM from where users can access assets from the DAM for final video production and delivery.

Subsequently, creative teams can integrate DAMs with other video production software such as content ingestion software, workflow management tools like Adobe Workfront, and video editing environments to support the content supply chain workflow.

Using a combination of these solutions with the seamless integration between Acorn and AEM users can enable capabilities such as:

• Browse or search to find required media in MAM to be published to the Adobe Experience Manager DAM.
• View selected list of assets from Acorn Cloud in the DAM’s publish UI feature to review, remove, or add assets from the displayed list and take any action before publishing.
• Leverage the publish UI feature to review the entire list of selected assets and metadata before final delivery of the content.
• Independently delete or purge assets from either the MAM, DAM, or both if desired.
• Clear asset hyperlinks in Acorn when delete or purge actions occur in AEM.

Adobe capabilities can be enabled using the CHESA integration layer, which will register the asset in AEM and populate any selected extended metadata. The CHESA integration layer also provides a registered hyperlink for each individual asset from the selected asset list that provides a clickable link to launch and position the originating Acorn UI at the originating asset data record.

In addition, all publish transactions are tracked in the asset history for the originating MAM or DAM so there’s a persistent audit trail for any published assets even if they have deleted from one system or another.

Figure 2 – Integrating MAM and DAM using Acorn Cloud and Adobe Experience Manager.

Conclusion

As your organization’s content library grows, you can benefit from both a media asset manager (MAM) with work-in-progress workflows and a digital asset manager (DAM) to house the library of finished content.

A reliable integration between Acorn Cloud on AWS and Adobe Experience Manager provides clients with a consistent method of delivery and collaboration, and the ability to manage high volumes of assets, continuously innovate, and ensure timely, relevant customer experiences.

CHESA’s Acorn Cloud gives you the ability to ingest, search, find, enrich, and organize your assets—all within a remote work-in-progress platform that can be integrated with a comprehensive content management solution such as Adobe Experience Manager. To learn more, please contact prosales@chesa.com.

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CHESA – AWS Partner Spotlight

CHESA is an AWS Select Tier Services Partner whose Acorn Cloud solution helps creative teams collaborate and manage their media in the cloud as a fully managed service.

Contact CHESA | Partner Overview