# How to keep track of media assets



## JimmyCrackCorn (Sep 6, 2010)

I'm looking for a way to automatically or at least partially automatically keep a track of where media files and all copies of those files are at any given time. It's for a production company and when working on projects they store assets in various locations for backups plus in various forms (different transcodes to formats of variously sized versions of the same media.) 

The media is at any given time on either the server, the large RAID storage volumes in each edit suite or on external hard drives used during shooting and as additional temporary back up locations. When properly backed up it is on at least two of these and sometimes all and sometimes also on tape drives for long term storage, but the important part is really the first 3 storage locations mentioned. The producer wants me to generate a document or something that will list where assets and their various incarnations are stored, this is changing often enough that it's impractical for me to simply look and write this information down, the process has to be automated in some way. I'm thinking it can be done on final cut server which will eventually be installed and running here but until then I need an interim system and even when Final Cut Server is running it will probably still be necessary to keep a track of where things on external drives are because I don't think these will tracked by final cut server. 

Is there any way to do this? I spent hours trying to make an automator workflow that would track the changes but I can't make it flexible enough to work autonomously and I'm not a skilled programmer, also it seems that the large volumes of data we're dealing with seem to make a lot of the pre-programmed functions I was using in automator unable to work without impractically large processing time. Is there a way within Mac OSx to do what I'm doing or do I need 3rd party software?


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