Full Video Transcript
Ryan here with Perforce Software and welcome to Helix DAM. Helix DAM is a great tool that can help your teams collaborate and organize the assets you make through your digital creation process. So with that, let's jump in.
Log in and browse the dashboard
So the first thing you'll come to when you log into your Helix DAM web page is your standard login. If you haven't been assigned a designer license yet for Helix DAM, you may come across this page. If you do, contact your Helix DAM admin to get that license assigned to you.
However, if you have a license, when you log in, the first thing you're going to come across is our main page which shows our search results of our most recent assets. Currently, this is unfiltered. However, from this page, we can get to our different projects and collections as well as just search on the entire server for all assets that are involved.
From this page, we can get to our various Helix DAM projects, collections and assets as well as browse to the other depots on our server to find assets that haven't been associated with Helix DAM projects yet.
Discover search and filter functions
If we come up to our search bar up top. We can, from this position, just do a general search on anything in any field, or we can have our specific itemized search. So if I wanted to find specifically JPGs, I could limit that down. I could also limit it to specific projects. So let's go ahead and do our demo_interior ones and click search.
And this would find me all JPEG specific assets to our demo interior project.
From our search result page, we can jump into individual assets and view the various tags that are associated as well as any other revisions that may have been uploaded. So from here, I can click through previous revisions of this scene to see the changes that have occurred. I can also look to see what project this is associated with and jump to that project specifically. Now, we can see that this asset is located within our demo interiors project that we searched. However, to get there, we're going to go back to the main page and navigate through the UI to get a little bit better of an understanding of the setup of helix, dam, and how projects can be organized.
Walk through a sample project
So back on our main page , if we want to navigate to our projects, it's right up top here. We can view our projects that are associated in Helix DAM. And initially, it's going to be filtered by the projects that I am a team member of. However, if I wanted to, I could view all projects on the server that I have permissions to view and I may not be an associated team member in the Helix DAM system. If I ever needed to go find something, copy it over, or perhaps request access. If we jump back to our projects, projects in Helix DAM roughly equate to depots in Helix Core. If you allow Helix DAM to automatically create all of your projects and collections for you, it will create a separate depot for each project to keep things separate and organized on your server. However, you can actually create projects and associate various streams to it within a single project.
So now If we jump into our project, the next level down of this organization is going to be our collections, and collections, essentially, map to various streams, within your Helix Core server. So again, if you allow helix, dam to automatically create your projects and your collections, just as projects will map to a stream depot collections will then map to individual mainline streams.
And so we've created effectively a mainline stream in this depot related to each one of these separate collections. If I go into my collection from here, we can view all assets that are available here, as well as any subfolders or various project hierarchy you may have established in your project already.
Now from our collections page, we can view all of our assets that are stored within that stream, as well as if we had any other folder hierarchy or project structure, those subfolders would display here as well. If we were to go ahead and jump into an asset, there's a lot of information we can gain about this asset directly through browser with Helix DAM.
For one, if it's a supported file extension type, We may have preview images or even be able to view the direct asset right here in the browser. So up top, you can see I've got a few different tags associated. Any tag displayed in blue is something that a user has added, and those are all user applied. Also, if you've set up a I tagging with your server, you will get automatically generated tags from that preview image.
Now, you can associate this with, um, AWS Rekognition or the AzureTagService, or even Deep Detect server if you prefer. Those tags will be indexed and aid in the search process for when you're needing to find various assets. If we have other versions stored on our server, we can always go back and load previous versions as shown.
And if I click over here to our info, we'll get various information about the file, where it's stored on the server, what changelists it's associated with and what revision we're on.
In the information tab is also where you're going to be able to find any various metadata you have associated, which are key value pair stores, as opposed to just values that are stored with the tags, as well as any other related links you've associated. These links can be anything that you need associated with these assets. So perhaps it's an authoring file, or perhaps it's linked to a Jira task. But you can associate those all right in Helix DAM. So that way your team can stay organized and know what this file is related to.
One of the thing to note about assets in Helix DAM is that they do have associated statuses that tie into various workflows.
Understand the review process
Right now, this asset is in an open state, which means that it has been uploaded and hasn't been submitted for review or been reviewed or rejected or anything along those lines yet. But if I were to come over here and switch this to in review, we will get a reviewers tab where anyone who is associated as an automatic reviewer for a certain collection will get automatically linked and then receive a notification. Or if I needed to, I could come in here and add specific users as well to the reviewer list so that way our asset can be reviewed and continue along our workflow. This status here also can be viewed from our Kanban board
Track projects with the Kanban board
where we can see everything that is open and all assets that have been uploaded in that status, as well as anything that's in review.
And here we can see, here's our desk lamp. And we can also, from this Kanban board, go ahead and move things along and push them into the next step in our workflow.
Now, if we jump into a different asset here, that is a little bit more action on it. You can quickly see within our asset view here that we have our image that we're viewing. This is a JPEG rendering of this library scene. Now, in image assets, you can see that you can register your comments in locations on your asset. So if we were to take a look here, we can see that we have comments right here that can be edited. You can also tag users, which will then send them a notification both in system and via email if you have your email server set up. From here, each of these are their own threads, and you can have various conversations on them, as well as these comments are associated with specific revisions. So if I wanted to I could only view specific version comments.
And if I were to step to a separate version. You would see that those are now grayed out because they're not related to this revision. On the side here we do have our full list as well so if you ever want to take a peek here without having to grab a specific one, everything will be listed out here chronologically. And if we were to again, jump to our info tab, we do have a few other things filled out. So beyond our basic info, which is going to give us information about this asset as stored on the Helix Core server with our depot path with our ChangeList number and what revision it is we're also going to get various metadata that a company admin or a project admin in Helix DAM can associate and set up. Now, these metadata fields are key value pairs and once you've established a metadata category that can either be from a single select style where everything is pre populated or a string style attribute if you need to store various information. Beneath that we do have our related links and here we've got our associated authoring scene, which if I were to select, this will then take me over to our Maya file that has actually rendered this Now, as Maya files are currently not supported for automatic preview image and thumbnail generation, you can see here that we do have the options to upload a preview image, which is what has been done. So this image is just a simple screen cap of our Maya scene that's been associated. So at least there's something to speak to and a reference point. If you'd like, you can also use the Helix DAM API to associate these rendered images directly, whether it's through a publish step or custom scripting that you've done.
Connect Helix DAM and Helix Core
So far, everything we've shown has been on a project that already exists within Helix DAM. So for this next section, let's go through a few different ways we can create projects, and then also link back to various assets that may already exist on our Helix Core server. So first and foremost, we're going to go ahead and step into our projects directory, and we're going to go up to create project.
Now this first one, We'll go ahead and call this demo new because we're going to demonstrate how to create a brand new project and allow Helix Core to automatically create everything for us. So if we leave this checked, we can say create, we'll end up with our brand new project. From here we can then create a new collection and we can say all this one demo_new_collection. And once we've created our collection, we're now ready to upload assets directly into our Helix DAM system, which will of course be stored in our Helix Core server. At this level, if we ever need to make a new collection, we can go ahead and create a new one and Helix DAM will automatically do all that work on the back end. From this point, if we ended up needing another collection within our project, we can always just create one new one here. And that will allow Helix DAM to make all those edits necessary on our Helix Core server to make the new mainline stream and start saving assets in that position.
Now, more often than not if you're new to Helix DAM but not new to Helix Core, you likely have existing streams depots that you need to associate your Helix DAM projects with.
And that's the second style of creation. So if we go back to our projects and we'll go ahead and create another project. We'll call this one demo existing, and I'm going to turn off automatically create Helix Core Depot. so with this style of project creation, since we've turned off that automatically create depot button, what this will do is create this project only in the Helix DAM metadata. So there isn't currently an existing Helix core depot that has been created by Helix DAM to be associated with this project. And we're free to select one and tie into it that way. So the next step from here, as opposed to creating a new collection, is going to be linked to streams. It's going to go ahead and ask us which existing Helix Core Depot would we like to associate and pull the stream from. So here, I have previously have a demo existing Helix Core Depot that wasn't created by Helix DAM. And I can go ahead and select our main line here, and I'll go ahead and name this one prod. From here, we can go ahead and manage which streams we want to have viewable in Helix DAM. And so here you can see that I do have a few development streams that branch off of this mainline. If I want to, I can also turn those on if I need to view those in Helix DAM. And when I click finish, I've now linked my Helix DAM project to these existing streams. And you can see here, I've got my production mainline section, and then I've got my... Development branches as well as my main and feature dev. I can now step into these associated assets and view them just as if I had let Helix DAM create everything for me.
So, that's more likely what you'll end up doing if you have an existing Helix core server is associating those pre existing stream depots and streams to a project within helix dam so that way you can start the review, commenting, and collaborating process.
Now, as
Invite team members to collaborate
we've created it, we have ownership of this project. And so we have the permissions necessary to start bringing team members in. So on the sidebar, if we drop down to our teams tab here, represented by our little person, we can go ahead and invite users. And in this list, we can pick from anyone in our server we can filter down. So I will add Jace. And we can multi select here,
Terry and let's add Jackie. And so now I've invited these users. And within here, I can have them either be designers, or if I need to I can take any one of these and also make them administrator. So if they need to, they can also affect our project settings our metadata fields, our workflows, and also add users additionally.
And with that, our walkthrough of Helix DAM is complete. You and your team should now have all the information necessary to use Helix DAM during your digital asset creation and management process.