Sometimes, it’s hard to picture the end product when facing a library of media assets. Dalet is instrumental in making your production concepts a reality; and one way we do this is designing our products to integrate with other trusted, reliable tools. One such group of solutions Dalet works alongside seamlessly is Adobe’s creative product lineup. Our products have only benefitted from the long-term partnership with the creators behind Audition, Photoshop, and Illustrator. To really understand the potential of this integration, let’s look at the relationship between Adobe Premiere Pro and Dalet Flex.

Working in the Field: Where the Adobe-Dalet Relationship Begins

In getting Adobe Premiere Pro and Dalet Flex to work together, our product team focused on two pain points:

• Making remote work actually work
• Facilitating project management

Dalet Flex offers editors a better way to manage projects by making the platform their central repository, not only for media files but also for the projects themselves. When integrated with Adobe Premiere Pro, the result is an efficient, cloud-based workflow optimized for collaboration and remote production.

Let’s take an example: your studio is working on a retrospective sports documentary. The workflow starts within Dalet Flex. Whether you have large libraries comprised of assets numbering into the millions, or simply a collection of content amassed over a year of production, Dalet Flex lets you build advanced data models and leverages controlled vocabularies, such as thesaurus or taxonomies, to make content easy to find. Free-text search strings can also be refined by going to the search results’ column headers, requesting specific parameters such as “Show me media shorter than five minutes.” or “Display content rated 3-stars by users.” By refining your content search, resulting media clips are reduced to only what you and your project will need.

Now having the specific media they want, users can gather them into a bin with a simple drag-and-drop as another layer of organization for your project. Dalet FlexMAM also allows you to clip and add to your bin only the exact portion required for your editing project.

With new clips borne from one asset or the assets you have collected in your various bins, a rough cut can be assembled using Dalet FlexMAM’s Sequence Editor. These sequences can serve as a starting point for a wide array of projects, easily imported into Adobe Premiere Pro. Additionally, users can open the Dalet FlexXTEND panel as an extension within Adobe Premiere Pro. This extension allows editors to browse the Dalet Flex library from within their creative environment, making all advanced search functions offered in FlexMAM also available in FlexXTEND.

Creating Content from Anywhere: Working in the Cloud

But what about when you are editing from a remote location or transitioning to a cloud-based operation? Let’s say that, for this sports retrospective production we are editing, I am working from home using Adobe Premiere Pro on my own workstation. Here, I will enable Proxy editing in FlexXTEND. When importing content from Dalet Flex, a proxy version is downloaded directly to my workstation. Now, I can edit remotely with proxy versions of the media assets. When the sequence is ready for rendering, FlexXTEND triggers the sequence rendering to a remote machine running Adobe Media Encoder.

High resolution media files can now remain close to the Media Encoder. Whether running on a cloud server or on-premises, Dalet Flex delivers maximum flexibility — no pun intended! — when it comes to where assets are stored and your Media Encoder machine is located.

In addition, Dalet Flex will soon add a custom MPEG-DASH reader to Adobe Premiere Pro so that editors can work inside Premiere Pro on growing files and enable workflows optimized for live content.

Project Management Matters More Than Ever!

We understand the importance of project management for creative teams. Dalet Flex now offers advanced features for rich asset and project management, which makes the life of Adobe editors easier in terms of collaboration and work efficiency. Dalet Flex effectively becomes the central repository not just for media files, but for Adobe Premiere Pro project files too. With this approach, projects are treated by Dalex Flex the same way as assets currently are. This offers a whole new world of possibilities to manage and collaborate on projects with the assignment of metadata, the ability to perform simple and complex search queries, and the access to all FlexMAM capabilities, be it directly in Dalet Flex or in Adobe Premiere Pro thanks to FlexXTEND.

How does this benefit video editors? Returning to the example of the retrospective sports documentary you are working on — let’s say you want to pull from another retrospective you put together in 2019. The FlexXTEND panel provides all of Dalet Flex’s search capabilities to find that project — assets and all — and import it back into Adobe Premiere Pro. The extra time and work required to return to a previous project and having to re-establish links to media files are no longer an issue with Dalet Flex integration. The solution now allows you to trigger workflows on Adobe Premiere Pro projects, for instance to restore media files from an archive when required. That is something of a real time saver.

Going further: What Is Coming Soon

What makes the integration of Dalet Flex and Adobe Premiere a must-have for content creators is that we are never satisfied with the status quo: always looking to improve, to innovate, and to ask, “What’s next?”

To keep improving collaboration and remote work, not only for editors but for all FlexMAM users, we will release brand new mobile applications for iOS and Android in upcoming months. We have much more planned, with increased Adobe Premiere Pro integration – this is merely the beginning. While this post has been focused on our integration with Adobe products, Dalet Flex also offers integrations with Avid environments. Stay tuned on this blog for more details in future posts.

If you want to know more about what we do at Dalet, or how Dalet Flex can take your Adobe Premiere Pro creative workflows to a new level of productivity, watch the VOD of our latest webinar and schedule a call with us. We look forward to providing you with solutions for your media production needs.