Key concepts

Helix 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 Helix 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 image, photo, video, audio clip, document, or any other type of file managed in Helix DAM.

See Working with assets.

Tag

A label used to help identify and group assets for better searching and browsing. Helix 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 Helix DAM, you only need to know how to use the Helix DAM interface.

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

  • Helix DAM is built on top of Helix TeamHub, which hosts source code repositories. If you have access to TeamHub, you can easily switch to it from Helix DAM.
  • Assets in Helix DAM are stored on a Helix Core Server, which tracks and manages changes to all of your assets in a single, secure location.
  • Helix DAM uses Helix 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. Helix 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 Helix 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 Helix Core Server permissions. Contact your Helix DAM project administrator for help.

Administering Helix DAM

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