Unit 39

Digital Assest Management (DAM) consists of the management of different tasks and decisions, using computer hardware and software to aid in this process. There are two sub-catergories of DAM, these are; Media assets management (MAM) and the more recent concept of Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Media asses management addresses audio, visual and other media content. ECM however tends to focus more on the lines of storing files online. Storing files online is a great way to access your files from any computer that has an internet connection. Most people don't even realise that they do this already, through the use of any emailing site such as hotmail, they store your messages online so you can reach them anywhere. Another example of this system is through an online programme called skydive, which is run through hotmail and some other emailing sites, this programme allows you to store up to 5GB of work for free on this sky drive so these files can be accessed any time you log into your hotmail account. For my design work i use a programme called 'Drop Box' it is a website based on web storage, you only get 2.25GB but you can choose to upgrade your account for a small fee and receive even more room, but if like me you use hotmail as well you have 5GB from that as well so overall you have 7.25GB of storage free. 

In digital imaging systems, colour management is the controlled conversion of colour through various types of media outputs, such as printers, monitors, TV's, digital cameras etc. what this means is that if you take a video using a digital camera, and you want to play it through a TV screen or a computer monitor, then colour management is there to make sure that the colour matches through each device. Most operating systems these days come with these colour management systems already implemented in them. A cross-platform view of colour management is the use of an ICC-compatible colour management system (ICC staring for the International Colour Consortium). The ICC colour management system does not just apply to videos, it also applies to still images, though this is just a more basic form of the system. There are two different types of colour profiles, Embedding and Working spaces. Image formats themselves such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, PDF, SVG and EPS may already contain embedded colour profiles but they're not required to do this by the image format. The ICC was designed to bring developers and manufactures together. The ICC standards permits the exchange of colour spaces and output device characteristics in the form of meta data. The other type of colour profile is working spaces. Working spaces such as sRGB, Adobe RGB and ProPhoto. These are colour spaces that facilitate good results while editing. An example of this is, pixels with the equal usage of RGB should appear neutral. Using a large or a gamut working space will lead to posterization and using a small working space will lead to clipping. Since a lot of computers use different operating systems there are obviously going to be different ranges of colour management systems across each operating system. In 1993 the Mac OS provided a colour management through a programme called Colour Sync, and in 1997 windows started using the ICC colour management system in the operating systems. When Windows released Windows Vista, the brought out there new colour management system called Windows colour system. In 2005 the majority of web browsers ignored the use of these colour management systems except for Safari 2.0 and Firefox 3. Firefox 3 came with this system but had it disables as a default setting but could be turned on at any time, but in Firefox 3.5 they decided to have it enabled as a default. IE9 (Internet Explorer 9) is the first Microsoft browser to partly support ICC profiles. The only problem is that it doesn't render images correctly according to the windows ICC settings. All it does is converts non sRGB images to the sRGB profile so it doesn't really provide any colour management at all. The most recent popular web browser to be released is Google Chrome, but this does not use any colour management system.