Elvis is Based on AIR and Flex
Except for the functionality that comes out of the experienced heads of the DutchSoftware team, most of Elvis’ good looks are courtesy Adobe’s AIR and Flex technologies. It is amazing what a developer can do with AIR and Flex, provided he can come up with some good ideas of his own. Using Flex and AIR gives Elvis’ its flexibility. Several millions of assets can be stored in the system without bogging it down. Elvis has no difficulties processing a constant stream of assets entering the system.
Elvis’ considerable flexibility is due in a large part to the concept itself. DutchSoftware didn’t want to use a database as the underlying core technology. A database couldn’t provide for the flexibility the developer wants to deliver, so instead DutchSoftware opted for a search engine approach. One of the nice results of not using a database is scalability. Elvis uses the search engine in clever ways, using a custom-made Media Processing Engine.
The search engine by itself is just an indexing and search library and does not contain crawling and HTML parsing functionality. At the core of the search engine’s logical architecture is the idea of a document containing fields of text. This flexibility allows the search engine’s API to be independent of file format.
Elvis’ Media Processing Engine creates thumbnails for images and extracts metadata already available in source files (such as EXIF data). Import is done automatically in the background or by dragging and dropping items in the import screen. Also files can be selected from hard disk drives, USB Flash Drives, etc. Restricted only by access rights that are defined on the administrator level, every client user can drag files in and out of Elvis.
An enterprise system that accepts desktop ease-of-use always earns good marks, because it removes the threshold that keeps people from actually using the system. Another such a clever feature is what happens when you drop a video clip in Elvis. Automatically, the system will create 20 seconds clips from a larger clip, and this will make it easier for an editor to select just the right part of the video for his project. Additionally, each video clip in Elvis can be scrubbed.