Understanding Video Metadata

27th August 2024

Creating video content is a great way to engage audiences across your digital channels, and the popularity of short form video in particular has grown hugely since the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn started prioritising it in their feed algorithms.

The drawback of having to produce lots of video content to grab your target market’s attention is that you need somewhere to store all of those files—and they’re not small.

A dedicated Digital Asset Management system allows you to store, organise, manage and share your video content easily, and applying video metadata is a key element of that process.

What is video metadata

Video metadata refers to the information that describes the content, format and attributes of a video. This could include the video title, description, relevant tags, video duration, the file format, resolution and frame rate, as well as details like the creator’s name and the date the file was uploaded to the DAM.

Types of video metadata

There are three types of metadata that apply to videos:

Administrative metadata
Structural metadata
Descriptive metadata

Each category contains different but essential information about the video file.

Administrative metadata

Administrative metadata refers to all of the information necessary for managing a video, for example the camera used for capturing the video, software used in its production, the name of the file creator, creation date and the upload date.

Structural metadata

Structural metadata relates to the internal structure of video content, including chapters, scenes, segments and shot changes. Structural video metadata allows for easy navigation of the video and helps to organise different elements of the video correctly.

Descriptive metadata

Descriptive metadata provides contextual information about the content of the video, for example the video title, description, as well as relevant keywords and tags.

Descriptive metadata helps DAM users and admins identify what the video is about and makes it easier to find relevant content in the DAM. Descriptive metadata is also what allows videos to be indexed and discoverable in online search engines like Google, although note that the videos would have to be published to a platform that can be crawled, such as YouTube. Videos saved in a DAM system will not be served by search engines in search results.

The benefits of video metadata

Applying metadata to your video content is incredibly important to ensure it can be organised and managed effectively, and there are a number of benefits to getting it right.

Find videos quickly and easily

Metadata is at the heart of a DAM system, and is the basis for the search functionality in ResourceSpace. Unlike in basic file management solutions like Google Drive and Box, metadata-based search makes it much faster and easier to find the resources you need.

What’s more, metadata will also be used to index your publicly published video content in search engines.

Facilitate interoperability

Video metadata allows resources to be understood and interpreted by machines as well as people, allowing the content to be transferred across different systems, platforms and interfaces, while ensuring interoperability.

For example, a video file stored in a DAM can be shared with external third-parties, published to your social media channels or edited within the Adobe suite.

Promoting your assets online

As we’ve already mentioned, video metadata is essential if you want to promote your video content online, because without it your content won’t be discoverable in search engines. Social media platforms, including YouTube, also rely on metadata for displaying your content correctly, for example showing the correct thumbnail, title and description.

Optimising video metadata for search

Just because your video has descriptive metadata applied to it, that doesn’t mean your content is going to rank well in search engines.

If you want your videos to be easily discoverable online, there are some best practices you should follow.

Use keywords in titles and descriptions

Identify the keywords that are relevant to your video (as well as those that people are most likely to search for) and include them in your video title and description. This allows search engines to understand what your video is about in order to serve it to users when they search for it.

Avoid keyword stuffing

Including keywords in your video metadata is important, but it’s equally important to avoid adding too many keywords. This is known as keyword stuffing, and can result in your content being penalised by search engines as they interpret it as an attempt to manipulate the results.

Titles and descriptions containing an unnatural number of keywords isn’t particularly useful for the user either, making it less likely they’ll want to watch your video.

Keep titles concise and informative

Aim to keep your video titles within 70 characters as longer titles are cut-off in the search results. If this happens the searcher might not fully understand what the video is about, making it less likely they’ll click on it.

Choose relevant thumbnails

The video thumbnail has a big impact on how many people click on your video. The thumbnail should be a fair representation of what the video is about, and also encourage the user to watch it.

Combine high quality images with readable text to give your content the best chance of standing out in video search results.

Video metadata in ResourceSpace

ResourceSpace uses metadata as the primary method of organising digital assets, allowing them to be classified in multiple different ways and making them easy to find within the DAM.

ResourceSpace makes it easy to add, edit and remove metadata from a video, while it also provides advanced AI features such as AI-automated metadata processing and tagging.

To find out more about how ResourceSpace can be used to store, organise and manage your video content, book your free DAM demo below.