File format conversions are a common DAM requirement and one of the most widely-used features to any digital asset management user experience. It’s a requirement because there’s tremendous value in being able to automate the tedious, repetitive and never-ending tasks of file conversions. As DAM News has recently pointed out, “A high proportion of the requests production staff in marketing communications departments tend to receive (where no central DAM exists) is image format conversion from colleagues who do not have a tool like Photoshop installed. This self-service element and ability to distribute workload more widely across the business is one of the major benefits of DAM.”
One of the best “features” of the Widen Media Collective is our very robust (for lack of a better term) support for a multitude of file formats and file conversions.
Our “robust” file conversions and the infrastructure to support it is often something we take for granted, largely because it’s been a defining feature of the Media Collective for over 10 years.
Widen has an inherent understanding of file formats and conversions that only we can boast. We’ve been creating, manipulating, transforming, and managing very large graphic files for the bulk of our 65-year-history as a premedia services provider.
Leveraging extensive graphic arts knowledge of Mac OS and Windows operating systems, complex file types, various file formats, and color space conversions, Widen has experienced and mastered digital file components. The understanding of these components is critical to developing and providing a powerful, easy-to-use digital asset management system. The end result is accurate, usable media for immediate used in print and web channels ensuring corporate brand consistency.
Here's a list of all our supported file types across all image, photo, audio/video, document, text and compression file types. This document shows what we handle today and how we handle them in terms of previewing, searching and converting.
Here’s the reasons why so many organizations have turned to Widen DAM with the assurance in knowing their assets are handled with care:
1. We do color right: We have unmatched expertise in color – period.
2. We scale to meet any demand: We have a sophisticated, elastic cloud infrastructure so the number of active converters / transcoders aggressively scales with demand. This allows us to fulfill very large download requests in a timely manner. When we’re operating at scale, we can fulfill a 1,000 file order in the same time frame as a 5 file order.
3. We can convert or transcode anything: We have multiple backend technologies available to us to perform any given conversion/transcoding requirement for today’s marketing and creative groups. From these, we will always use the technology best suited to the source asset and the derivative to be delivered.
4. We offer a vast amount of conversion options: We possess highly configurable outputs and out-of-the-box we can produce almost any desired output. If we can't produce it out-of-the-box, then we have a proven track record of working with clients to add any additional configuration points needed.
5. We have enterprise-class format support: We support, preview and convert all major image and video formats (and more). Our infrastructure allows us to easily add support for any additional formats that a client might desire. Recent examples of non-standard formats that we have added to Collective include iBooks, InDesign documents and InDesign archives.
If that’s not enough to give you confidence in our ability to handle your digital assets, just let us know what will.
Put us to the test!Request a demo to see how we do it and for the opportunity to interact with a live sandbox.