Cocreate Wants to Kill the Worst Part of Video Production and Editors Are Already On Board

The Macro: Post-Production Has a Boring Problem Nobody Is Fixing

I have spent time talking to editors and DITs (Digital Imaging Technicians, for those outside the industry) and the universal complaint is never about the creative work. It is about everything that happens before the creative work. Media prep. The process of taking raw footage off camera cards, syncing audio, creating proxies, verifying file integrity, and organizing everything into a project structure that an editor can actually use.

On a professional shoot, this process takes days. A single day of multi-camera production can generate terabytes of footage across different codecs, frame rates, and audio sources. An assistant editor or DIT has to manually match every audio track to every video clip, transcode everything into proxy formats, verify checksums to make sure nothing got corrupted during transfer, and then organize it all by scene, take, camera, and sometimes by person. Miss one step and you get an editor opening a project on Monday morning to discover that half the audio is out of sync or a reel is missing.

The tools that exist for this workflow are fragmented. DaVinci Resolve has some media management capabilities. Silverstack is a DIT-focused tool that handles on-set data management. Kyno (now part of Lesspain Software) does media browsing and transcoding. PostLab handles collaboration. But none of them automate the full pipeline from card ingest to edit-ready project. Each tool handles a piece and the gaps between them are filled by manual work, custom scripts, and institutional knowledge that lives in one person’s head.

The professional video production market is large and growing. The global post-production market was valued at over $25 billion in 2024. But the media prep segment specifically is unsexy enough that the major NLE vendors have mostly ignored it. Premiere, Avid, and Final Cut all assume you show up with organized media. They do not help you get there.

The Micro: Four Founders Who Actually Talked to Editors First

Cocreate automates the media prep pipeline for professional video production. The software reads slates, syncs footage to audio, groups multi-camera setups, transcribes and marks dialogue, creates stringouts, and outputs a completed project structure. A full day of shooting goes from raw cards to edit-ready project in under twenty minutes.

The founding team is Tamish Pulappadi, Archish Arun, Sid Yu, and Matan Hamam. Four founders from San Francisco, out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch. The company name is not accidental. They built the product alongside working editors, DITs, and post supervisors rather than guessing at what the workflow needed. That approach shows in the feature set, which maps directly to real production pain points rather than abstract AI capabilities.

The product integrates with all four major editing platforms: Premiere, Avid, Final Cut, and DaVinci Resolve. That is not a trivial technical achievement. Each NLE has its own project file format, metadata schema, and proxy workflow. Supporting all four means Cocreate can slot into any post-production pipeline regardless of what the editor prefers to cut on. Most competing tools pick one or two NLEs and ignore the rest.

I want to highlight the checksum feature because it reveals how well the team understands the user. On a professional set, losing footage is a career-ending event. Checksums verify that every file transferred from the camera card is bit-for-bit identical to the original. DITs do this manually and it is nerve-wracking every time. Cocreate runs checksums automatically during ingest. That one feature alone would be enough to get a DIT to try the product.

The competitive landscape breaks down by workflow segment. Frame.io (owned by Adobe) handles review and collaboration but not media prep. Hedge handles data transfer and verification but not syncing or organization. EditReady does transcoding. Sync-N-Link does audio sync. Cocreate is trying to replace three or four separate tools with a single automated pipeline. The risk of that approach is that you have to be good at all of it. The advantage is that if you pull it off, switching costs become very high.

The product is live and you can book a demo on their site. They are not selling to individual YouTubers. The target is professional production teams handling large volumes of footage. That is a smaller market than “all creators” but it is a market that pays real money for tools that save time.

The Verdict

Cocreate is solving a problem that every working editor and DIT will immediately recognize. Media prep is tedious, error-prone, and expensive. It eats hours that could be spent on creative work. The fact that nobody has automated the full pipeline until now is one of those market gaps that seems obvious in retrospect.

The question is whether the automation actually works across the messy reality of production. Footage comes in different codecs, different frame rates, sometimes with missing metadata, sometimes with slates that are unreadable, sometimes with audio that was recorded on a completely separate system with no timecode link. Every production is different. The product has to handle all of that gracefully or editors will go back to doing it manually.

In thirty days, I want to hear from three working editors or DITs who have used Cocreate on a real production and whether it actually delivered the twenty-minute promise. Sixty days, the metric that matters is repeat usage. Did the same team use it on their next project? Ninety days, I want to see pricing and whether the business model is per-seat, per-project, or subscription. The market is ready for this product. The founding team built it the right way, in conversation with the people who will use it. If the technology holds up under real production conditions, this could become the standard tool for media prep across the industry.