New platform turns raw footage into a broadcast ready rough cut and shows its editorial reasoning at every step. Digital Nirvana will give a first public look at RoughCut on the show floor at IBC2026 in Amsterdam.
AMSTERDAM, September 3, 2026. Digital Nirvana, a media AI company with 30 years of experience in broadcast and media technology, today announced RoughCut, an AI editorial platform that assembles broadcast-ready rough cuts from raw footage and explains every decision it makes along the way. The company will demonstrate RoughCut for the first time publicly at IBC2026, running September 11 through 14 at the RAI Amsterdam, at Stand 2.C12.
Digital Nirvana is calling RoughCut an AI editorial platform rather than an AI editing tool, and the distinction is deliberate. Most of the AI assembly tools that have entered the market over the past few years behave like vending machines: footage goes in, a cut comes out, and no one on the editorial team can say why the software chose what it chose. RoughCut was designed to work differently. It reasons through an edit the way a human assistant editor would, and it writes that reasoning down alongside the cut.
Every Video Team Knows This Problem
For every finished minute of video, editorial teams routinely shoot hours of raw footage. Before a single creative decision is made, someone has to watch it all, log it, tag it, and hunt down the handful of moments that matter. That work is slow, repetitive, and expensive, and it happens before the story ever takes shape.
The shift underway is bigger than any one newsroom or post house. In its 2025 Creators’ Toolkit Report, Adobe found that 86 percent of creators worldwide are now using generative AI in their work, a sign of how quickly AI-assisted workflows have moved from experiment to expectation across the media and content industry. Editorial teams are living that same shift from the inside. The question is no longer whether AI belongs in the edit bay. It is which AI they can actually trust with their footage.
Where Most AI Editing Tools Fall Short
That trust question is where much of the current generation of AI editing software runs into trouble, according to Digital Nirvana. Most of these tools work on one clip at a time, for one editor at a time, and once a cut is finished, whatever the software learned about that footage disappears. Nothing flows back into the archive, the media library, or the professional editing tools a team already relies on for finishing.
RoughCut was built to be the opposite. It is a shared, multi-user platform that becomes more useful with every hour of footage a team adds, and it keeps a written record of its editorial reasoning attached to every project, visible to anyone who opens it later.
How RoughCut Works
RoughCut moves through four stages. Editorial teams begin by ingesting raw footage, and RoughCut’s pipeline detects scenes and shot types, transcribes every spoken word, identifies faces and on-screen text, classifies audio, and automatically segments the material into ready-to-use clips.
From there, RoughCut builds a deep understanding of the footage. Every clip carries layered metadata covering shot type, people, mood, on-screen graphics, transcript and narrative role, and the platform holds a persistent memory of the entire footage library, not just the current project.
Composing a cut happens through plain language direction. An editor describes the video they want, and RoughCut’s AI Co-Pilot assembles a timeline, explains which clips it selected and which it passed over, and refines the edit through follow-up conversation. Editors can still adjust anything by hand on a real, multi-track timeline. RoughCut assembles the first cut; the editor keeps the final say.
When a cut is ready, RoughCut delivers it directly into the tools a facility’s finishing editors already use, with the platform’s editorial reasoning, notes and metadata carried along rather than left behind.
“For 30 years, Digital Nirvana has helped broadcasters and media organizations make sense of their content. RoughCut is the next chapter of that mission,” said Hiren Hindocha, CEO of Digital Nirvana. “Generative AI has moved from a novelty to a genuinely competitive advantage across the creative industry, and every media organization we talk to is asking the same question: which AI can we actually put in front of our editorial teams and trust. We built RoughCut to answer that question directly. It is a platform that shows its reasoning instead of asking teams to take it on faith, and we believe that standard of transparency is where this entire category is headed.”
Built to Fit Into the Pipeline You Already Have
RoughCut was designed to slot into existing post production pipelines rather than replace them. Finished cuts export natively into Avid Media Composer through AAF, Adobe Premiere Pro through XML, Final Cut Pro through FCPXML, and DaVinci Resolve through XML and EDL, along with OpenTimelineIO for pipeline automation and CSV or JSON output for media asset management systems. Every export can carry AI markers, editor notes, subtitle files and color metadata alongside the cut itself, so the intelligence RoughCut generates travels with the footage into whichever tool a facility’s finishing editors use.
Early Results
Early access teams are already putting RoughCut to work on live projects. One early access broadcast partner used RoughCut to cut its highlight assembly turnaround from hours to minutes on a recent event, without losing the editorial reasoning behind a single selection.
See It in Amsterdam
Digital Nirvana will demonstrate RoughCut live at IBC2026, September 11 through 14, at Stand 2.C12. Attendees are invited to bring their own footage to the stand and watch RoughCut ingest it, search it by meaning rather than keyword, and compose a broadcast ready cut in real time, with the platform explaining its choices along the way.
Book a Meeting at IBC2026
To reserve time with the Digital Nirvana team at Stand 2.C12 during IBC2026, visit https://calendar.app.google/NuC7k2UzhxFk5zZj7
About Digital Nirvana
Digital Nirvana is a media AI company with 30 years of experience serving the broadcast and media industry. Its product portfolio includes MetadataIQ for AI powered media discovery and metadata tagging, MonitorIQ for broadcast signal monitoring and compliance, TranceIQ for transcription, captioning and subtitle translation, and RoughCut, its AI editorial platform for professional video teams. Digital Nirvana’s products help broadcasters, sports organizations and media companies find, understand and deliver content faster. Learn more at digital-nirvana.com.
Media Contact
Russell Vijayan
Director of Business Development
russellv@digital-nirvana.com
