On-prem storage to Premiere Pro, with Imaginario’s video intelligence in the middle
Search thousands of rushes and dailies on the shared storage your post-production team already runs, by what is said and what is on screen. Select the moments, then send clips, sequences and timecoded metadata straight into Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve. The originals never move.
The most common workflow among the post-production teams that use Imaginario.
The workflow
Post-production teams keep their media on shared storage: EditShare, Avid NEXIS, Quantum StorNext, Facilis or a NAS in the machine room. Most of it is not an archive. It is the rushes and dailies coming in from production, thousands of clips per project, especially in high shooting ratio genres such as documentaries, factual entertainment and reality shows.
Imaginario indexes that storage where it sits, working from proxies, so the originals never move. Editors, assistant editors and producers search the rushes by what is said and what is on screen, select the moments, and send clips, sequences and timecoded metadata straight into Premiere Pro, or into DaVinci Resolve and Avid Media Composer. Finished clips go back to the same storage. It is the most common workflow among the post-production teams that use Imaginario.
Search runs in the Imaginario app against the proxies, so an editor working remotely searches the same library as the one in the suite, and only the clips that make the cut need to travel. That is what turns shared storage into a remote video editing workflow without a second copy of the archive in the cloud.
What Imaginario does in the middle
Imaginario is the intelligence layer between the storage and the edit. It never replaces either. It understands the footage at shot level, what is said, who is on screen, what happens and how the story unfolds, so it can surface highlights, answer questions about the library, assemble rough cuts and return insights and metadata. That is more than the tagging you get from a MAM add-on, and it is what the three steps below are built on.
| Find | Video search across everything indexed: dialogue search for what is said, visual search for what is on screen (including image-to-video search), audio search for sound, and person search for who appears. Ask your library answers questions across the whole archive in plain language, and AI indexing produces the timecoded metadata behind all of it, in more than 100 languages and dialects. |
| Cut | Select the moments into collections, build a story spine or a first assembly with multi-video stories in StoryLab, and use Highlight to Edit for a first pass and Clip Studio to trim and reframe. Transcripts, captions and chapters come from the same index. |
| Deliver | Export a clip or a whole collection as a sequence with timecoded metadata into Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve or Avid Media Composer, send finished clips back to the same storage, return metadata to a MAM or DAM, or publish straight to YouTube and Shorts. |
What goes in and what comes out
| Direction | What moves |
|---|---|
| From your storage | The folders you choose, indexed selectively from proxies at 3 to 5 Mbps in any resolution |
| Into Premiere Pro (or Resolve, Avid) | Clips, sequences and timecoded metadata, ready to edit |
| Back to your storage | Finished clips, written to the location you pick |
| What stays put | The originals, your folder structure, your permissions |
How to set it up
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1. Connect the storage | Most on-prem connections run through Cubix, the media orchestration platform from our partner Ortana. Ortana and your storage admin set up the connection once, then you choose the folders to index. You can start with one project and add more later. |
| 2. Let Imaginario index it | Imaginario works from proxies of the selected folders, 3 to 5 Mbps at any resolution, and indexes what is said, what is on screen and who is on screen. Speech is analyzed in more than 100 languages and dialects. The originals do not move. |
| 3. Search the rushes | Ask for the moment the way you would brief an assistant editor: a line from an interview, a location, a person, an action, a type of shot. Search across every rush and daily in the project, or across the archive, and refine with filters. |
| 4. Select the moments | Hand-pick the takes and soundbites into a collection for the editor, or let multi-video stories in StoryLab assemble a first story spine from the interview moments you chose. Trim and reframe in Clip Studio if needed. |
| 5. Send it to Premiere Pro | Export a clip from a single asset, or a collection across many assets as a sequence for a compilation or rough cut. Timecoded metadata travels with every clip. The same export goes to DaVinci Resolve or Avid Media Composer. |
| 6. Write finished clips back | Send the finished clips back to the same storage so the rest of the team, and your MAM if you run one, sees them where they expect. |
Three ways post-production teams use it
| Use case | How it works |
|---|---|
| Finding the moment in thousands of rushes | A factual series shoots hundreds of hours for a handful of episodes. The assistant editor asks for every take where the contributor mentions the accident, every wide shot of the farmhouse at dusk, every moment a named person appears, and gets a timecoded list across every rush and daily in the project instead of scrubbing bins. Dialogue, visual and person search run across the whole project, and the transcript sits next to every result. |
| Story spines from interviews | For an interview-led documentary or a reality episode, the producer selects the soundbites that carry the story, in order, and hands the editor a sequence with the timecodes attached. Multi-video stories in StoryLab can assemble the first pass from the moments chosen, and the editor builds the cut around it in Premiere Pro. |
| Best shots, B-roll and reuse | Visual search pulls the best shots of a location, an action or a mood from the rushes, and Ask your library answers questions such as which takes have the cleanest audio. The same search covers the archive, so B-roll and moments from earlier projects come back into a new edit without anyone remembering where they were. |
Who runs this workflow
Post-production teams and facilities cutting factual documentaries, factual entertainment, reality and other high shooting ratio genres, from a two-editor shop with a NAS to a broadcaster on Avid NEXIS. See how Imaginario fits post-production teams and the media companies whose in-house editors run the same flow.
Integrations in this workflow
Connection: Ortana Cubix. Sources: EditShare, Avid NEXIS, Quantum StorNext, Facilis, local storage. Destination: Adobe Premiere Pro, or DaVinci Resolve and Avid Media Composer with the same steps. See all on-premise storage integrations and the other popular workflows.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to move my media to the cloud?
No. Imaginario indexes the folders you choose on your shared storage and works from lightweight proxies. The originals stay on your NAS or on-prem system, in the folder structure and permissions you already have.
Which storage systems does this cover?
EditShare, Avid NEXIS, Quantum StorNext, and Facilis have their own integration pages, and local storage covers workstations and directly attached drives. Any shared storage that can be reached as a folder fits the same workflow.
What arrives in Premiere Pro?
Clips, sequences and timecoded metadata, ready to edit. You can export a clip from a single asset, or clips from several assets as a sequence for compilations and rough cuts. The help center has a walkthrough for single-asset export and multi-asset export.
Does the same workflow work with DaVinci Resolve or Avid Media Composer?
Yes. The search and selection steps are identical, and the export goes to DaVinci Resolve or Avid Media Composer instead of Premiere Pro.
Get started today
Enjoy thousands of minutes of AI analysis, transcriptions, search, and auto-captions, plus much more.