The best DAM for video is the one whose assumptions match video, and a lot of DAM software was designed around images. The giveaway is the unit of retrieval. An image DAM returns files, which is correct for a photo and wrong for a ninety minute recording where the useful thing is forty seconds somewhere in the middle. Judge candidates on that first, then on the plumbing underneath.
What video breaks in a system built for files
Size, first. A library of stills fits where a library of source footage does not, and every serious video system ends up managing two copies of everything, the original and a proxy light enough to play in a browser.
Then time. A photo has no inside. A recording does, and the thing you want has an address in it. A system that cannot hand you a timecode is asking you to open the file and scrub, which is the work you were trying to avoid.
Then text. For long-form material the transcript is often the only searchable surface there is, which is why teams with big spoken archives end up paying to have transcripts made for every episode. Having them made is not the same as being able to search them. Plenty of archives have good transcripts sitting in files that no search touches.
Then the tail: versions and renders multiply, and old material moves to cold storage where getting it back takes hours.
The routes
Folders and a naming convention cost nothing and survive on discipline. They work for one editor and fail across a team, because two people never name things the same way twice.
A general DAM gives you permissions, approvals and a single place that counts as truth. Check how it treats a long file before you buy it for video, since search inside the media is usually where the image heritage shows.
A video-specific system understands proxies, timecode and archive tiers. It costs more in setup and it wants somebody to own it.
The hidden cost across all of these is migration. Adopting a system usually means moving terabytes into it, and the material that most needs to be findable is the oldest material, already sitting on a NAS or on tape.
Vivu takes the other side of that trade. Footage stays in the storage you already pay for and stays private under your own access control, and the search layer reads it where it sits instead of asking you to upload a copy first.
When you do not need a DAM for video
One editor, one drive, project work that is delivered and never reopened. In that setup a DAM is a second thing to maintain and it earns nothing.
Also worth naming: if your actual problem is running out of space, that is a storage purchase, not a DAM purchase. Buying a catalog to solve a capacity problem leaves you with the capacity problem and a catalog.
Questions before you sign anything
Where do the original files live after adoption, and who controls access to them.
Does it generate proxies, and what does the first pass over the archive you already have involve.
Does a search return a file or a place inside a file.
What does restoring something from cold storage actually look like for the person who needs it.
What comes out on the day you leave, and in what format.
Reading your own answer
If most of your pain is governance, who can use what, which cut is approved, where the delivered master lives, you are buying a system of record and you should expect to move material into it. If most of your pain is that everything is already stored fine and nobody can locate the moment inside it, moving terabytes will not fix that, and a system of record bought for search reasons tends to disappoint on exactly the axis you bought it for. The teams that get this wrong usually pick by feature count. The ones that get it right pick by which of those two sentences describes their last bad week.