Blog

Why We Built Flow AI

Finding a specific moment in your library, a jersey logo, a crowd reaction, or a specific interview setup often feels like digital archaeology. When a producer remembers a shot but can’t locate it, the result is hours of manual scrubbing that drains creative momentum. Because video is unstructured data, there is no inherent metadata that tells you what is happening on-screen. Historically, the only solution was manual logging, which is slow, expensive, and rarely complete.

At NAB this year, we’ll be showing off FLOW AI, our new analytical AI engine designed to bring intelligence directly into media management and workflow automation. It does the unsexy but essential work: finding logos, recognizing faces, describing scenes, and adding the context needed for true semantic search inside our core FLOW asset management interface. It’s a major step forward in how EditShare customer teams can understand, organize, and move faster with the content they create every day.

We have some previous experience with audio and video AI processing. Our generation one offering was expensive, slow, and required two different products to actually accomplish most tasks. We learned from that experience.

We could have treated the next version of AI as a web-based integration: sending files to AWS or Google, pulling results back, and stitching it into the UI. But that approach creates exactly the kind of fragile, multi-vendor complexity media teams are trying to escape (and failed the first time). Our customers don’t want another system to configure or another support boundary when deadlines hit: they want intelligence that’s native to the workflow they already trust. That’s why we made AI a core part of FLOW, building on the broader platform transformation we described in The Rebirth of FLOW. Along the way, we also strengthened FLOW’s underlying search performance, because sophisticated customers managing millions of assets were pushing the platform to its limits. We optimized for that scale.

This approach does come with a trade-off today: AI video processing requires a dedicated GPU server, adding additional entry costs. We built the first version for serious editing teams and media management professionals who aren’t dabbling with a few clips, but need to analyze and organize 500+ hours of content every year, like reality TV productions, large corporate marketing teams, and sports organizations. 

Over time, we’ll fold GPU capability into our core server architecture to eliminate extra hardware and reduce friction, and we’re also focused on displaying FLOW AI results inside DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere. 

We’re building AI that actually works in real media operations, not demos.

Book a 1:1 demo or stop by booth N1251 to see how these tools perform in real-world media operations and how native intelligence can turn your archive into a functional, searchable asset.

NAB 2026 is shaping up to be the “AI Show,” but for most video editors and post-production supervisors, the excitement is mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism. Between the ecosystem friction found in once-seamless tools  and the constant noise of new plugins, it’s hard to tell what will actually save you three hours on a Tuesday and what is just a shiny toy.

Before you hit the floor, here is a guide to the four kinds of AI you’ll encounter, and how to spot the real problem solvers.

1. The Generative “Shiny Toys”

These are the booths with the longest lines. They show you how to swap a background or generate a voiceover in seconds. It’s impressive technology, but for many high-end pros, these are silver medal features. They are fun to play with, but they don’t solve the digital archaeology of digging through thousands of folders just to find one three-second soundbite.

2. The “Black Box” Harvesters

Many AI tools operate by sending your content to a third-party cloud for processing. This often comes with “fine print” that allows them to use your footage to train their machine learning models, which is a massive dealbreaker for corporate and legal teams concerned about biometric data and intellectual property.

3. The Creative’s Brain (FLOW AI)

For production teams managing massive amounts of media and cold storage, the real problem is the archive. FLOW AI acts as a Production Asset Management (PAM) powerhouse designed for the rigors of on-premise hardware.

4. The Library Gateway (MediaSilo AI)

While FLOW handles the archive, MediaSilo AI is designed for your library: the active and past projects you are currently sharing for review, approval and delivery.

Making Sense of the Ecosystem: One Engine, Two Missions

At the EditShare booth, we’re showcasing how these two systems work together while serving unique purposes. 

FLOW for the surgical, on-prem production management and archive 

MediaSilo for the collaborative, cloud-based library and transcription

Because they share the same engine, your intelligence, including face, logo, and speech detection, remain consistent and secure from the first ingest to the final archival search.

Stop by Booth N1251 at NAB

Don’t get distracted by the shiny toys. Come see how we’re solving the digital archaeology problem and making media libraries usable again.

Would you like to see the gold medal AI in action?

Moving past the “cool factor” to find the tipping point where search friction starts costing you real money.

AI indexing is rapidly becoming a standard feature in media workflows. It’s easy to assume that adopting it is simply part of staying current. But at EditShare, we believe that’s the wrong starting point.

The more useful question isn’t “What can AI do?” but rather: Does it change the economics or throughput of your specific operation?

The Tipping Point: From “Annoying” to “Expensive”

We’ve all heard the complaint: “We produce more than we can find.” For a small team, that’s a minor annoyance. For a high-volume production house, it’s a business failure.

The “tipping point” occurs when search friction manifests as a tangible loss. We’ve seen it happen in three specific ways:

  1. The Duplicate Shoot: A team flies a crew out to capture “generic city b-roll” because no one can find the high-quality drives from six months ago.
  2. The Missed Deadline: An editor spends six hours “scrubbing” through raw footage to find a specific interview soundbite, pushing the delivery past the broadcast window.
  3. The Lost Opportunity: A brand wants to do a “throwback” campaign, but the archive is such a “black hole” of unindexed data that the creative idea is killed because the labor cost to find the clips exceeds the project budget.

When AI Indexing Doesn’t Make Sense

If your team produces one-off projects that are delivered and rarely revisited, the long-term value of indexing every frame is limited. An archive that is rarely accessed does not suddenly become valuable just because it has more metadata. Searchability enables reuse, but it does not create reuse on its own.

When the Math Changes

Where AI indexing begins to make financial sense is in environments where volume and reuse are structurally important.

The Reality Check

AI is a lever, not a magic wand. It is brilliant at pattern recognition, like finding a logo, a specific face, or a spoken word. It still struggles to interpret emotional nuance or “vibe.”

Furthermore, the technology only works if the workflow changes. Media must be centralized, and metadata must be visible exactly where the editors work. Without adoption, indexing is just background noise.

The “office” is no longer a single building when it comes to media production. It’s a global network of edit suites, home offices, and field locations. But for years, the barrier to seamless collaboration has been the dreaded VPN (Virtual Private Network).

Traditional VPNs are often the “bottleneck” of creativity. They are notoriously difficult for IT departments to manage, confusing for freelance editors to set up, and, most importantly, frequently underperform when handling high-resolution media.

That’s why we created SwiftLink, powered by our partnership with ZeroTier. Here is how we solve the remote access puzzle for good.

The Problem: The “VPN Wall”

Remote production usually hits one of two walls:

  1. The Enterprise Wall: Corporate IT departments are often reluctant to grant external freelancers access to the main corporate VPN due to security risks or complexity.
  2. The Capability Wall: Smaller production houses may not have the technical “wherewithal” to build or maintain a high-performance VPN that can handle the rigors of real-time video editing.

When connectivity fails, editors resort to shipping hard drives or struggling with “SMB over WAN,” which simply doesn’t work for professional workflows.

SwiftLink integrates ZeroTier directly into the EditShare ecosystem to create a “Private Cloud” that is secure, affordable, and incredibly fast.

1. Instant Access for Freelancers

Instead of a complex manual setup, an admin simply generates a 16-digit network ID.

2. “Peer-to-Peer” Performance

Unlike traditional VPNs that route all traffic through a slow central server, ZeroTier acts as a “cloud broker.” Once the connection is made, it gets out of the way.

3. Connecting the Global Studio (Site-to-Site)

SwiftLink isn’t just for individuals; it’s for entire facilities. You can link up to nine distinct sites (e.g., LA, London, and a field unit) into a single ecosystem.

The Bottom Line

SwiftLink removes the “IT middleman” and the “physics bottleneck.” Whether you are a solo freelancer needing to mount a media space as if you were in the room, or a global studio syncing terabytes of data, SwiftLink makes the connection invisible so you can focus on the story.

3 Ways MediaSilo Protects Your Unreleased Content

A “secure perimeter” is no longer enough in today’s media production. As workflows become increasingly distributed, the industry is shifting toward a Zero-Trust model: Never trust, always verify.

In our latest episode of Cut to the Chase, Chris Zeid (Manager of Technical Support & Services) and Simon Lamprell (VP of SaaS Product & Engineering) discuss how MediaSilo doesn’t just store content, it secures the entire production process.

1. Project Access. How MediaSilo goes beyond the password.

The traditional username-and-password model is one of the weakest links in security. MediaSilo replaces this legacy approach with identity-bound access methods designed for the modern studio.

Key Technical Takeaways:

2. Granular Permissions: Production-Minded Access

Security shouldn’t be “all or nothing.” A freelancer needs different permissions than an executive producer. MediaSilo was built with the production process in mind, offering granular control over who sees what, and what they can do with it.

Key Technical Takeaways:

3. Forensic Protection & Behavioral Intelligence

What happens when content leaves the platform for review? This is the point of maximum vulnerability. MediaSilo utilizes a multi-layered defense strategy to deter leakers and provide 100% accountability.

Key Technical Takeaways:

Security That Enables Creativity

At EditShare, we believe that when you don’t have to worry about the safety of your assets, you have more room to be creative. MediaSilo gives you the peace of mind that your “work-in-progress” projects are protected by the most advanced security features in the SaaS space.

Ready to see these features in action?

In the current media landscape, “Video AI” has become a catch-all term that has lost its meaning. When a headline screams about AI, is it talking about generating a photorealistic cat from a text prompt, or is it talking about an algorithm that can index 500 hours of raw footage in minutes?

The distinction matters. For media organizations, lumping these together creates a “Chasm of Trust.” One category is creatively exciting but operationally risky; the other is the engine of the modern media supply chain.

To build a sustainable 2026 roadmap, we have to stop talking about AI as a monolith and start looking at the four distinct categories of the video AI landscape.

1. Generative AI: The High-Hype Creative Frontier

Intent: Create video from scratch. 

The Job to be Done: “Make something that didn’t exist before.”

This is the AI of Runway, Pika, and OpenAI’s Sora. It’s text-to-video, requiring no real-world actors or original footage. While it’s arguably the most “flashy” category, it remains the most operationally risky for professional workflows. Issues regarding copyright, IP safety, and “hallucinations” mean that for now, adoption is high for ideation and pre-viz, but low for high-stakes production.

2. Editing-Assist AI: The Creative’s Power Tool

Intent: Enhance existing footage during the edit. 

The Job to be Done: “Help me finish faster or fix a technical problem.”

This category lives inside the NLE (Adobe Premiere, DaVinci Resolve). It’s the “Generative Fill,” the background removal, and the audio cleanup tools that editors have rapidly adopted. Why? Because it lives inside familiar tools and doesn’t threaten the creative process—it simply removes the “drudgery” of manual fixes.

3. Selection & Rough-Cut AI: Finding the Story

Intent: Move from raw footage to an editable sequence. 

The Job to be Done: “Help me find the best takes faster.”

This is a burgeoning category focused on automated selects and string-outs. For unscripted, social, and high-volume content, selection AI is a massive time-saver. However, editors remain cautious here; trust in “automated storytelling” is still being earned, and control remains the top priority.

4. Analytical & Operational AI: The Engine of ROI

Intent: Search, review, and manage content at scale. 

The Job to be Done: “Operate my content business more efficiently.”

This is where EditShare lives. This isn’t about creating pixels; it’s about understanding them. It’s the layer of AI that sits within your Production Asset Management (PAM) and review systems to provide:

Analytical AI is where real adoption is happening because it offers a clear ROI. It removes friction from high-analysis jobs where AI actually makes business sense.

Crossing the Chasm

Crossing the AI chasm in media isn’t about replacing the editor; it’s about removing the “Search Tax” and the “Chaos Tax” that plague high-output teams. When AI is embedded directly into your storage, your PAM, and your review workflows, it ceases to be a “feature” and becomes an operational standard.

At EditShare, we are focused on the “Grown-Up” side of AI. The side that prioritizes security, predictability, and business value over flashy prompts.

See the Future of Operational AI at NAB 2026

We are heading to Las Vegas this April to showcase how we’ve embedded these analytical and operational AI layers directly into FLOW and MediaSilo. If you are ready to move past the hype and into a high-efficiency AI roadmap, we’d love to show you what we’ve built.

Book a 1-on-1 strategy meeting with our team at NAB 2026.

In the high-pressure landscape of 2026, media teams are constantly tasked with delivering more content in less time. To stay ahead, your infrastructure needs to do more than just store files, it needs to act as a force multiplier.

In this installment of our Cut to the Chase series, EditShare’s Shanna is joined by FLOW product expert Lucy Seaborne to dive into three features that turn FLOW into the ultimate “Swiss Army Knife” for post-production efficiency.

1. EditShare One: Ending the “App Juggling” Era

For years, media professionals have been forced to bounce between different applications to search, log, and ingest media. This “context switching” is a silent productivity killer. EditShare One solves this by providing a unified, browser-based experience that serves as a single point of entry for the entire team.

Rather than managing a fragmented toolkit, users access tailored modules designed for their specific roles. Whether it’s a producer checking a simplified dashboard or a media manager scheduling complex ingest feeds, the interface remains consistent and accessible from any browser. By centralizing these tasks, teams can eliminate the friction of software silos and focus entirely on the creative output.

2. Speed Over Friction: The Seamless Proxy Workflow

Remote work is no longer a luxury; it’s the standard. However, the biggest hurdle for remote editors has traditionally been the “relinking drama” between low-res proxies and high-res masters. Lucy highlights how FLOW removes this bottleneck by automatically generating high-quality proxies the moment media hits the system.

This allows editors to begin cutting on a standard Wi-Fi connection immediately—even for 8K projects—without waiting for massive file transfers. The real magic happens during the finish: with a single toggle in the FLOW panel, the NLE switches back to the high-res media for final color and export. This creates a friction-free bridge between the rough cut and the final delivery, regardless of where the editor is located.

3. FLOW Automation: The Assistant Who Never Sleeps

Manual “grunt work”—like transcoding, moving files to the correct folders, and sending “media is ready” notifications—can consume up to 20% of a creative team’s day. FLOW Automation functions as a background assistant that handles these repetitive tasks without human intervention.

By building customizable, “set it and forget it” workflows, administrators can ensure that every file is QC’d, renamed, and delivered to the right department automatically. With hundreds of possible configurations, this engine doesn’t just save time; it virtually eliminates the risk of human error in file management, keeping the creative team focused on the story rather than the folder structure.

Reclaim Your Creative Time

The goal of FLOW isn’t just to manage assets—it’s to return hours to your production schedule. From a unified interface to an automation engine that handles the heavy lifting, these features are designed to help your team work smarter, not harder.

Watch the full episode below to see these features in action and learn how to get your creative time back.

Want the full conversation?

If you’re creating media today, you’re juggling more pressure than ever: tight deadlines, dispersed teams, unpredictable workloads, media scattered across locations, and the need to pivot quickly without burning through budget.

We hear these challenges every single day, and we built FLEX to solve them.

FLEX cloud video storage editshare

What Is FLEX?

FLEX is EditShare’s suite of powerful cloud-based media production solutions built on AWS. It gives creative teams everything needed for cloud editing, collaboration, storage, media management, and archiving, all without re-building your workflow from scratch.

For over a decade, EditShare has helped media professionals create outstanding content with collaborative storage and asset management. FLEX extends that expertise to cloud workflows, letting you scale, adapt, and collaborate from anywhere.

Why FLEX Exists

Teams aren’t moving to the cloud because it’s trendy. They’re moving because they need:

The problem? Building cloud workflows on your own is complicated.

Fragmented tools, disconnected services, and unpredictable performance quickly become time-consuming and expensive.

FLEX removes that complexity, giving you turn-key, cloud-native workflows that are powerful, flexible, and simple to operate.

FLEX at a Glance 

Remote Collaboration, Anywhere

Work with editors, producers, colorists, and VFX teams no matter where they live. FLEX supports both full-resolution and proxy workflows, synchronized through AWS and accessible securely via VPN.

Scale to Match Your Production Calendar

Whether you’re a one-team boutique or an enterprise running multiple concurrent projects, FLEX lets you increase or reduce compute, storage, and workstations as needed, without stranded costs.

Work With the Tools You Already Love

No vendor lock-in. FLEX supports all leading NLEs, Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve, both on cloud and on-premises.

OPEX Instead of CAPEX

No more multi-year infrastructure purchases. FLEX lets you align spend with usage.

FLEX Is More Than Cloud Storage. It’s a Complete Production Environment

FLEX + AWS = Best-of-Breed Architecture

By running FLEX inside your own secure AWS account, you get:

This isn’t “shared cloud.” It’s your cloud, your security, your control.

FLOW: The PAM Engine Behind FLEX

At the heart of FLEX is FLOW, EditShare’s powerful PAM built specifically for production workflows.

FLOW gives you:

Your team can start editing on day one.

Smart, Software-Defined Layering on AWS

FLEX includes EditShare’s software-defined storage, which intelligently uses AWS tiers for performance and cost efficiency.

Benefits:

Whether you’re five creators or 500, FLEX delivers what your team needs.

Built for Your Journey to the Cloud

FLEX deployment options

FLEX Cloud Edit

A complete post-production environment in AWS with virtual workstations optimized for NLEs. Ideal for scaling capacity or connecting distributed teams.

FLEX Cloud Edit+

A turnkey, pre-integrated solution that adds:

This reduces setup effort while giving teams powerful oversight and cost control.

A Better Answer to Archive

If you’re not ready to do full cloud production, FLEX Cloud Sync still delivers immediate ROI.

It gives you:

Tape workflows are slow and operationally heavy. Cloud Sync replaces that burden with a fast, economical, reliable archive.

Remote Workflows Built-In, Not Bolted-On

FLEX supports remote access to full-res or proxy media whether content is stored:

Teams can truly collaborate, not just pass files around.

Why Customers Choose FLEX

FLEX delivers all of that.

Ready to See FLEX in Action?

Whether you’re exploring cloud editing, migrating archives, scaling teams, or just tired of “make it work” workflows, FLEX gives you a reliable, best-of-breed path forward.

We’d love to walk you through options that match your workflow today and where you want to go next.

The past few years have reshaped the way creative teams operate, with hybrid and fully-remote workflows becoming the norm rather than the exception. Post-production teams now collaborate across studios, time zones, and cloud platforms, and the stakes for protecting valuable content are higher than ever.

To keep projects moving without exposing sensitive assets, secure digital platforms have become essential, not optional.

This is exactly where MediaSilo excels: enabling teams to collaborate easily while offering enterprise-grade protection for works-in-progress, pre-release cuts, and promotional materials.

The rise of distributed post pipelines, AI-assisted editing tools, and global delivery schedules means visibility control, watermarking, and access management are no longer “best practices,” they’re survival requirements.

Whether you’re new to MediaSilo or looking to get more from your current workspace, here are five key platform capabilities to keep your post-production workflow protected.

1. Customize user access with workspace and project permissions

Today’s productions rely on flexible teams filled with freelancers, agencies, remote VFX studios, finishing houses, marketing teams, and internal stakeholders.

MediaSilo’s multi-level user access controls let you manage them all confidently.

These granular permissions are especially valuable when teams share assets early with AI-assisted editing or captioning partners, where strict access limitations are required.

When files must leave your workspace, whether for review, approval, or distribution, MediaSilo provides multiple controlled sharing options.

Private Links require identity authentication before any access is granted, ensuring the recipient truly is who they say they are.

You can also:

Automatic expiration has become a key compliance practice as more studios adopt SOC2 and TPN standards.

3. Protect against theft and leaks with SafeStream watermarking

MediaSilo’s SafeStream technology remains one of the strongest safeguards against unwanted leaks, either visual or forensic.

SafeStream offers two complementary options:

Visible watermarking

Invisible (forensic) watermarking

SafeStream can be applied at the project, org admin, or template level.

Studios increasingly enforce forensic watermarking for AI dubbing and localization workflows, where multiple vendors receive pre-release assets.

4. Log in securely with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Strong authentication remains one of the most effective defenses against unauthorized access.

MediaSilo’s MFA feature adds an extra verification step beyond username and password.

For media teams without SSO (Single Sign-On) infrastructure, MFA provides robust security without additional IT overhead.

5. Track and control content activity in real time

Security isn’t just about restricting access; it’s about visibility.

MediaSilo’s Insights dashboard gives you real-time oversight across your entire workspace:

These insights make compliance reviews faster and help you pinpoint misuse before it becomes a crisis.

MediaSilo’s expanded audit trails have become critical for distributed editorial teams working on tightly embargoed content.

Future-Proof Your Post-Production Workflow

Hybrid work. Distributed creatives. AI-assisted editing. Secure sharing across borders. The workflows of today (and tomorrow) require thoughtful security.

MediaSilo helps you:

If you’re ready to strengthen your post-production pipeline, we’re here to help.

Start a hands-on trial and see how MediaSilo enhances security without slowing down creativity.

In today’s media landscape, content is no longer a linear path from A to B. It’s a complex web of multi-format media, distributed teams, and ever-shifting delivery requirements. As projects span multiple generations of technology and pull from diverse external partners, many facilities find themselves trapped in a workflow environment defined by fragmentation and potential error.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re managing files instead of creating content, you’re not alone. But in 2026, staying competitive requires more than just storage. It requires a “workflow brain.”

Are You Using the Right Tool for the Job?

One of the biggest hurdles in modern production is the confusion between different asset management systems. While the terms are often used interchangeably, using the wrong system for your specific needs can lead to significant inefficiencies.

Our latest white paper, “Smarter Workflows, Stronger Output,” breaks down these critical distinctions to help you design a smarter, more scalable pipeline:

More Than Just Storage: Orchestrating Your Success

A true PAM doesn’t just shuttle files from one place to another; it actively protects the context surrounding your media. From automating repetitive tasks to enriching metadata at every stage of the process, a PAM like EditShare FLOW ensures that your information becomes more useful, not more fragmented, as it moves through the workflow.

Whether you are navigating the challenges of remote collaboration, managing complex metadata schemas for broadcasters, or trying to surface QC issues hours before delivery, the right asset management strategy is foundational infrastructure.

What’s Inside the White Paper?

Don’t let your workflow limit what’s possible in a digital, collaborative environment. Learn how to build a dependable system that eliminates chaos and improves efficiency.