The article discusses combining technologies to achieve performance exceeding the sum of multimedia parts. The Multimedia Annotation and Enhancement via a Synergy of Technologies and Reviewing Operators (MAESTRO) is a research and demonstration system developed at SRI International for exploring the contribution of a variety of analysis technologies, for example, speech recognition, image understanding, and optical character recognition, to the indexing and retrieval of multimedia. Through MAESTRO, the researcher or technical user can discover, develop and test synergistic strategies of combining multimedia analysis technologies to achieve archiving and retrieving capabilities far exceeding that possible with any of these technologies individually. The article implements a number of these strategies, for example, using a lexicon of names from the named entity detector to enable correct recognition of video overlay captions by optical character recognition. MAESTRO has motivated new ideas for combination strategies. INSET: The SRI MAESTRO Team.