Free the stories hidden in your footage.
Turn terabytes of raw footage into structured story cuts.
- Made for
- Agencies · In-house studios · Production companies
- Cinema formats
- ARRI · RED · Sony · Blackmagic · and more
- Runs on
- Cloud · On-premise
- Languages
- 50+ languages
Story is the foundation. Not a feature. Every clip understood. Every arc surfaced. The NLE is now used for precision, not decisions.
Synema reads your footage for meaning. It surfaces narrative beats, identifies who's speaking, and understands what they said. The same patterns editors and writers apply instinctively, now built into the platform.
That intelligence is available to everyone on the story. An intelligent scripting layer generates fully cut drafts using the same methods high-level production companies apply. Editors use it to find and arrange exactly what they need through a hybrid human-AI interface: full speed, full control, precise NLE output.
A live review panel keeps the story visible throughout. Teams review, revise, and align before anything 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. Story lives in moments, conversations, reactions — but editors are left to 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. Story has changed. The tools haven't.
Synema moves story upstream, into the moment when it's still forming, so everyone can shape it before it becomes a timeline problem.
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
Ingest & classify
Every clip enters labeled as interview, b-roll, or edited sequence. Story starts at ingest, not at the timeline.
Transcription & speaker identity
Every word transcribed, timestamped, and attributed to a named speaker. Search the entire archive like a document.
Story intelligence
AI reads every interview for narrative arc and surfaces the moments that move the story, including ones you would never have thought to look for.
Semantic story layer
Every spoken moment indexed as meaning, not keywords. Find what a subject said about a specific experience across your entire archive, even if they never used those words.
StoryCut
A new kind of editing interface. Edit in language, but every sentence is anchored to a face, a moment, a clip. See the whole story at once, then export a native sequence.
Collaboration & review
Frame-accurate comments, formal approvals, and public or private draft sharing. Everyone working 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.
Built by video people. For video people.
Most tools will help you do everything except shape that point of view. They'll transcribe, they'll search, they'll color, they'll render. Brilliant craft that doesn't matter if the story isn't in it.
Story is the only throughline that makes the rest worth doing. And story is what falls, every single time, to whoever happens to be in the edit bay at 11pm on a deadline, stitching outputs from a dozen tools that were never designed to talk to each other.
We built Synema to answer the question the rest of your stack forgot to ask: what story is in this footage, and are we telling it? Every editorial choice that works ends up back in the platform — so 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. Private beta now. Request an invite, or if you're looking at an enterprise deployment, talk to us.