namely audio recordings, photos, and videos. Any editing process that involves media, especially video, can make use of a MAM to access media components to be edited together or combined with a live feed in a fluent manner. A MAM typically offers at least one searchable index of the images, audio, and videos it contains, constructed from metadata harvested from the images using pattern recognition, or input manually.

Digital asset management (DAM) may focus on the electronic management of any form of a digitally stored piece of information.