Key concepts

P4 Digital Asset Management (DAM) provides a simple web-based interface for artists and designers to work with assets that are securely stored in single, secure location. Using P4 DAM, you can:

  • Search for and browse assets.
  • Tag assets to find and organize assets.
  • Upload and download assets.
  • Copy existing assets for easy reuse.
  • View versions of assets to see past iterations.
  • Review, mark up, and comment on assets.
  • View and change the status of assets on a Kanban board.

Terminology

Project

A project contains a collection of assets you can work on yourself or with a team. For example, a project may contain all assets for a specific game.

See Projects.

Collection

A collection is a folder that contains a set of related assets in a project. Projects can have more than one collection. For example, if the project is for a game, you may have three collections of assets named Vehicles, Buildings, and Characters.

See Collections.

Asset

An asset is an image, photo, video, audio clip, document, or any other type of file managed in P4 DAM.

See Work with assets.

Asset bundle

An asset bundle is a group of assets, such as textures, models, animations, and materials, that are related. For example, you might put all the components of a video game character in the same asset bundle, or you might put all aspects of a particular movie scene in the same asset bundle.

See Work with asset bundles.

Tag

A tag is a label used to help identify and group assets for better searching and browsing. P4 DAM can automatically tag assets when they are added, but you can also manually add and remove tags.

See Add tags to assets.

Behind the scenes

To successfully use P4 DAM, you only need to know how to use the P4 DAM interface.

Perforce products are used to host the P4 DAM assets for your team:

  • P4 DAM is built on top of Perforce TeamHub, which hosts source code repositories. If you have access to TeamHub, you can easily switch to it from P4 DAM.
  • Assets in P4 DAM are stored on a P4 Server, which tracks and manages changes to all of your assets in a single, secure location.
  • P4 DAM uses P4 Search in conjunction with Elasticsearch to search for your assets by name or tag. Searches can be filtered by project, collection, tag, author, type, size, date, and version. P4 Search can also be configured to manage automatic tagging of image assets using third-party services, such as DeepDetect and Azure tags.

Your administrator will set up P4 DAM and the products needed to support it.

Permissions

To view and work with assets in a project, you must be a member of the project. Otherwise, actions you can perform are limited by your P4 Server permissions. Contact your P4 DAM project administrator for help.

Administering P4 DAM

Before users can access P4 DAM, an administrator needs to set it up. To learn more, see P4 DAM administration.