Assets

In order to build up your library of assets in Dalet Flex, you must ingest files first. “Ingest” means to take a standalone digital file such as a film clip, stored locally on your computer or on a remote server, and converting it into an asset that is managed by Dalet Flex. When a digital file is ingested into the platform, a number of steps will take place.

An asset is a different concept to a digital file: An asset is a Dalet Flex object that encompasses all of the information about a digital file, including metadata, keyframes, and technical information. A digital file on the other hand, is simply a file that resides on a file system. A full list of the file formats that Dalet Flex automatically recognises and indexes on ingest is provided in the Types and Formats section under the supported file formats sub-heading.

Most assets in Dalet Flex represent an underlying digital file which will reside on a Flex storage resource. It is however perfectly legal to create an asset that does not point to a digital file. This is often referred to as a “placeholder asset” as it does not reference a digital file.

The asset is one of the most important concepts in Dalet Flex as it represents content. Most others relate to managing and interacting with assets.

Asset Hierarchies

Assets rarely exist as standalone objects. More often, assets exist as part of a hierarchy in a “parent-child” relationship. The parent is always the original asset that was ingested (also referred to as the “source asset”). When some actions are carried out against an asset (e.g. transcode), new “child” assets are created. When child assets are created they are automatically associated to the parent asset as a child asset. The asset hierarchy provides a powerful means of traversing a tree of assets and understanding how they relate to one another.

Asset hierarchies are automatically created by the system when new assets are created. Users cannot create their own hierarchies.

Asset types are as follows:

Icon Type
Media Asset: A media asset is automatically created when an audio-visual file is ingested.
Image Asset: An image asset is automatically created when an image file is ingested.
Text Asset: A text asset is automatically created when a text file is ingested.