PAM vs MAM:
What is the Right Tool for Your Post-Production Workflow?
by Derek Barrilleaux, CEO, Projective
Let’s have a frank conversation. As a post-production engineer or technical lead, you’ve likely been in this meeting before. Someone throws up their hands and says, “I’m tired of not being able to find anything. Fix it!” So, you do some research and discover a whole world of MAMs designed to help visualize and search for content. Problem solved, right? But now it’s up to you to figure out how to make it work, and more importantly, how to align the MAM with the way your team actually works.
Then the complaints start. Editors say it’s clunky and kills their creative flow. Or you, the engineer, are left wrestling with a system that creates more manual work than it solves. The problem isn’t the technology itself, it’s the application.
Your MAM and your active production workflow are designed for two different jobs. It’s like a chef trying to cut a prime steak with a spoon.
The Architecture Is the Limitation
The fundamental reality we often ignore is that a MAM lives outside the creative process. It is a destination, not a workspace. Your editors and artists live on high-performance shared storage; that is their home. The MAM, by definition, is located somewhere else, architecturally and often physically.
These aren’t edge cases you can patch with better features. They are fundamental limitations of the architecture itself. When you try to bridge this gap, you usually face two bad options:
- •The “Gateway” Method: You insert the MAM between the editor and their storage. This forces creatives to go through the MAM interface to get their files, which they hate because it feels like a roadblock.
- •The “Crawler” Method: You configure the MAM to index production storage. This is an engineer’s nightmare, as it pollutes your database with temporary files and creates a massive cleanup job.
Your Teams Work on Projects, Not Assets
The core issue is that a MAM is designed for finished assets. Its job is to archive, distribute, and track final content. But your creative teams don’t work on finished assets; they work on projects. They live in Avid, Premiere Pro, and After Effects, dealing with raw footage, countless versions, and complex folder structures.
This is where the disconnect happens. Forcing a MAM to manage the dynamic, messy environment of production is a losing battle. The solution isn’t to force a tool to do a job it wasn’t built for. It’s to use a tool designed for the project-based reality of production: a Production Asset Management (PAM) system.
PAM: The Right Tool for Production
A PAM is not a replacement for your MAM; it’s the essential layer that manages the “messy stuff” of production that MAMs don’t handle well. A PAM like Strawberry is architecturally different. It doesn’t just point at your storage from the outside; it actively manages the storage itself, right where your users work.
By focusing on projects, a PAM provides real value to the editing team and massive relief to the admins trying to manage the chaos.
- •It embraces the project workflow: It understands how NLEs work and organizes media based on the project, not just the file type.
- •It manages the chaos: It controls shared storage, handling permissions and mounting volumes automatically, so editors don’t have to be IT admins.
- •It’s intuitive: It feels like a natural extension of the editing tool, not a third-party gatekeeper.
Think of it as the intelligent middleware between your project management software (like Asana or Monday) and your actual file storage. It automatically translates tasks into structured, permission-based workspaces for your creative teams.
Use Cases: Complement or Replace?
At a certain scale, you often need both a MAM and a PAM. They serve different purposes, and you need them to work well together.
- •Complementing a MAM (Enterprise): Leading media organizations have proven the power of this dual approach. Global media companies like SBS, Disney, The Weather Channel, and DAZN use Strawberry alongside their corporate MAMs (such as Evertz Mediator, CatDV, IPV, or Dalet Galaxy). The PAM handles high-speed production, and the MAM manages long-term archive. This ensures the archive only receives clean, finished asset
- •Replacing a MAM (Agencies & Teams): Smaller companies, agencies, and teams like Arsenal Football Club and TUI realized they didn’t need a big, expensive enterprise MAM. They just needed a tool to manage their creative production. For them, Strawberry simplifies operations without the complexity and overhead of a full-scale MAM.
The AI Conundrum: You Can’t Plug AI into Chaos
If all that complexity weren’t enough, every organization is now exploring how to leverage AI, and postproduction is no exception. However, if you only apply AI at the MAM level, you miss the most valuable data from your production process.
You can’t plug AI into chaos. Strawberry’s ability to eliminate the chaos of post-production and automate structure is a prerequisite for any sensible AI strategy.
AI is an efficiency play, but its real power in our industry is improving workflows and automating steps during creation. By pointing AI at a PAM, you can maximize the value of your raw content and project data, creating efficiencies long before anything reaches the archive.
Time to Leverage the Right Tool for the Right Job
Ultimately, this isn’t about choosing PAM or MAM. It’s about using each solution where it works best.
- •Use Strawberry as a PAM to manage the fast-paced, iterative world of production. Let it be the framework and guardrails that simplify and accelerate your projects.
- •Use the MAM to do what it does best: archive, monetize, and distribute the finished content once the PAM hands it over.
By recognizing this distinction, you stop asking your MAM to do a job it wasn’t built for. You stop polluting your archive with production junk. Most importantly, you give your creative teams the right tool—the knife for the steak—and let them do what they do best: create.
Ready to stop fighting your workflow?
Contact the Projective team today to see how Strawberry can bring order to your production chaos and give your creative teams the tools they need to succeed.
Published: 6 March 2026