Now onboarding · 2026
Synema is the workspace where footage becomes story.
For teams making unscripted video, Synema brings footage understanding, narrative development, and collaboration into one place, before and alongside the timeline.
- Made for
- Agencies · In-house studios · Production companies
- Cinema formats
- ARRI · RED · Sony · Blackmagic · and more
- Runs on
- Cloud · On-premise
- Languages
- 50+ languages
The camera rolls before the story is known. Synema makes the material understandable. Your team decides what the story is.
Comprehension. Synema watches every hour you shoot. Every speaker known. Every word searchable. Every beat found. The material becomes legible before anyone scrubs a timeline.
Story intelligence. Stories cut the way an editor cuts. Sequenced, paced, whole. Not stitched-together soundbites. Editors use the same intelligence to find and arrange exactly what they need: full speed, full control, precise NLE output.
Intuitive editing. Trim quotes to the word. Adjust speaker tone. Reshape the arc in a shared studio where everyone previews and approves before the edit reaches the NLE.
Story isn't a timeline problem.
It's just where we've been forced to build it.
Scripts used to align the team before anything was shot. Today, most professional content has no script. You capture broadly: long interviews, multiple cameras, more than one possible story. That is not a failure of planning. It is how real-world video gets made.
But story now lives in moments, conversations, and reactions. Editors shape it alone, inside a timeline no one else can really use. Every revision adds friction. Review breaks the flow. More tools don't solve this. They surround it.
Even generative AI serves the opposite kind of work: specification, where you already know what you want. Unscripted video is discovery: you don't know the story until you explore what you captured. And discovery never got its own tools.
Synema moves story upstream, into the moment when it's still forming, so everyone can shape it before it becomes a timeline problem.
The old model.
The image is not the story.
Production technology keeps getting more precise about the image. Color. Sound. Delivery. The harder problem comes earlier: understanding the material well enough to find the story. Teams still answer that question across folders, transcripts, timelines, review links, and memory.
In unscripted work, reviewing footage is story work.
Two layers most tools don't build.
The footage layer. The editorial layer. One without the other can't shape unscripted story.
The footage layer.
Every clip ingested becomes part of a searchable institutional record: every word transcribed, every face matched, every moment indexed. Not just for this project. Across every project you've ever made.
The editorial layer.
On top of it, a versioned library of editorial logic. Where a testimonial's challenge has to land. What a strong closer looks like. The decisions a producer makes by instinct, encoded and mapped into every cut.
Together.
When the editorial layer reaches for a moment that isn't in this interview, it searches the library. When the library has terabytes of accumulated footage, the editorial layer knows where to look.
Most tools build one. Story needs both.
The Platform
The story discovery layer: the missing piece between your raw footage and your NLE. Here's what it does for the people who live in the edit.
Know what you have
Drop in the cards. Every clip arrives labeled as interview, b-roll, or edited sequence before anyone has watched a frame. Story starts at ingest, not at the timeline.
Every word, on the record
Transcribed, timestamped, and attributed to a named speaker, so ten years of interviews read like one searchable document.
The moments that matter, surfaced
AI reads every interview for narrative arc and hands you the moments that move the story, including ones you would never have thought to look for.
Search by meaning, not keywords
Find what a subject said about a specific experience across your entire archive, even if they never used those words.
StoryCut: edit the story, not the timeline
Work in language, with every sentence anchored to a face, a moment, a clip. See the whole story at once, then export a native sequence.
Everyone shapes the cut
Frame-accurate comments, formal approvals, and public or private draft sharing. The whole team works from the same story, not a version of it.
The full engine.
Every capability below exists to make story decisions faster, richer, and less dependent on whoever happens to be at the keyboard.
Any story. Any edit.
Synema is built for unscripted, interview-driven work, with custom story types on request. Each type carries its own editorial logic: how testimonials open, where documentaries breathe, what makes an event recap land. Encoded once, applied to every cut. Use the full platform end-to-end, or just the search: find a clip in seconds and drag it straight into your existing edit.
Patient & family stories.
Healthcare storytelling built from testimonial and b-roll.
Documentary features & shorts.
Unscripted narrative work with multiple storylines and arcs.
Brand anthems & campaigns.
Interview-driven brand films that need a point of view.
Testimonials & case studies.
Proof and validation cut from customer conversations.
Employee spotlights & recruiting.
Culture and talent videos from unscripted interviews.
Donor & fundraiser reels.
Mission-driven asks for non-profits and institutions.
Event sizzle & recaps.
Gala, conference, and fundraiser highlight edits.
Long-form interview content.
Podcast video, expert conversations, creator episodes.
Social-first cutdowns.
Short-form clips pulled from long recordings.
Educational & explainer.
Expert-led teaching from interview and voice-over.
Custom story types.
Tell us what you make. We'll build it in.
Made for.
Teams making real-world stories at volume.
Healthcare systems
Find and shape patient, family, clinician, and community stories across growing footage libraries.
Universities & non-profits
Make donor, student, faculty, and impact stories easier to discover, and easier to bring back when the next campaign begins.
Agencies & production companies
Turn more source material into a clearer editorial process for your team and your clients.
In-house brand studios
Build a durable understanding of the people, ideas, and footage your organization captures continuously.
Your footage is more valuable than your workflow can reach.
Every archive contains interviews never revisited, b-roll never rediscovered, and stories that weren't right for the first film but may be essential to the next one.
Synema turns stored media into editorial material: searchable by meaning, connected to people and moments, ready to support the work ahead. For organizations with years of institutional footage, archives measured in tens of terabytes, this isn't a speed problem. It's a story-yield problem.
Your archive should be a source of stories, not a place where stories disappear. Talk to us about your archive.
Built for the work before the cut.
Professional video tools have become highly capable at handling the image. But for teams working with real people, real footage, and stories that cannot be fully scripted, the central problem begins earlier: understanding what was captured and deciding what it means.
Synema was built around that problem. We believe footage should be more than files. A transcript should be more than text. Collaboration should happen before decisions become expensive to change.
Our work is to make the material understandable, so the people responsible for the story can direct it with full context. Every editorial choice that works ends up back in the platform, and the next cut starts smarter than the last.
I'm Yis Tigay. I spent years as a producer watching good teams ship competent cuts that missed the story. The right moment: the patient who articulated what mattered, the family on discharge day, the line that captured an entire campaign, was always buried somewhere we couldn't find in time.
Synema is the tool I wished existed. Built for teams working in unscripted, interview-driven formats: healthcare systems, universities, agencies, independent docs. We're onboarding early teams now. Request an invite, or if you're looking at an enterprise deployment, talk to us. We review every request to make sure the beta is a strong fit.