The two companies will be at IBC 2026, to show their solution to solve one of post-production’s most persistent and expensive problems: lost metadata.

Qumulo and Colorfront, the Academy and Emmy Award-winning developer of Transkoder and On-Set Dailies, announced a strategic collaboration to solve one of post-production’s most persistent and expensive problems: data associated with shot details and specifications created on-set almost never survive the journey to the people who need it. The two companies will preview their joint work during IBC 2026, 11–14 September, Amsterdam.

The new joint work writes on-set metadata directly into the file, so lens, colour and framing decisions survive every copy, move and archive tier, and stay searchable in plain English years later. The aim is to solve the problem faced by productions until now:metadata dies in transit.

In fact, every frame shot on a modern production arrives with a substantial body of information attached, known as metadata in the technology community. Metadata includes camera make and model, sensor mode, resolution and frame rate. Beyond that, systems also capture lens, focal length, aperture, focus distance, timecode, reel and scene identifiers, colour intent as ASC CDL values and LUTs, framing intent, sound roll and sync points, script supervisor notes, circle takes, VFX flags… the list is ever growing and evolving with new technologies. There only one problem: almost none of it reaches the people downstream, until now.

The information is fragmented across camera-original headers, sidecar files, ALEs, EDLs, spreadsheets and a colourist’s local project database. Each hand-off (set to dailies, dailies to editorial, editorial to VFX, VFX to finishing) is an opportunity for the loss of important metadata, flattened into a filename, or transcribed by hand. By the time an assistant editor asks for “the handheld night exteriors on the 32mm, the ones the DP circled,” the answer requires scrubbing through hours of material.

Put simply, losing the metadata results in production delay. The costs are difficult to calculate, but imagine 20 artists working on a project overnight, and each takes between 15-20 minutes of an assistant’s time whenever they need a frame and this happens on average two times per artist per hour. That means somewhere between 10 and 13 hours per night are wasted. Over the course of a year, across multiple production pipelines, a studio may bleed millions in this inefficiency alone, and that doesn’t factor in the rework required if the assistant pulls the wrong files.

The solution is simple: write the metadata to the file, then make the file searchable. The collaboration joins two pieces that each solve half the problem. Colorfront Transkoder and On-Set Dailies already sit at the point in the pipeline where metadata is richest. They ingest camera-original material from every major manufacturer and reads what the camera recorded. Colorfront then adds considerably more during processing: colour transforms and ACES pipelines applied, ASC CDL and LUT decisions, HDR and Dolby Vision metadata, framing decisions, audio sync, and (in Transkoder/On-Set Dailies 2026) AI-derived information including text detection and automated quality-control findings such as clipped highlights, crushed blacks and judder.

Previously, the expanded metadata was written into deliverables and sidecars, and its usefulness has decayed from that point forward.

Today, Qumulo NeuralSearch is storage-native search built into the Qumulo Data Platform. It indexes file metadata continuously as data lands, with no external crawler and no separate search infrastructure, and answers SQL, natural-language and semantic queries directly against the filesystem.

In collaboration, Colorfront and Qumulo join forces at the file-layer itself. Rather than emitting metadata to a sidecar that can be separated from the picture, Transkoder writes what it discovers and derives into Qumulo user metadata attached to the file object, through the Qumulo Core REST API. The Qumulo indexer lifts those values into typed, queryable columns as part of its normal indexing pass.

Using Colorfront + Qumulo, metadata is packaged as a property of the media, carried by the filesystem, surviving every copy, move, and tier transition, and searchable from the moment it is written.

Immediately saving thousands of hours of work every night across the overnight ecosystem.

Here is more information about the solution:

What it looks like in practice

Once the metadata is resident on the file and indexed, retrieval stops being a browsing problem and becomes a query.

• Instant dailies. “Everything from B-camera on day 14 with the DP’s circle-take flag” resolves to a selection in seconds rather than an evening of assembly.

• VFX pulls. “All shots on the 32mm with the green-screen flag, at 4K or above, that have not been pulled yet” returns not just the plates but the colour transforms and framing metadata the vendor needs alongside them: the pull arrives complete rather than as a list of filenames a coordinator then has to chase.

• Conform and finish. Shots are located by the colour and framing decisions recorded against them, rather than by reconstructing intent from an EDL and a folder structure.

• Archive and reuse. Material from a production that wrapped two years ago is as findable as material shot this morning, because the searchable information is attached to the frames rather than to a project file that has since been archived, corrupted or superseded.

At IBC, Qumulo and Colorfront will preview the workflow end-to-end: metadata originating on-set, expanded by On-Set Dailies and Transkoder during processing, written to the file on Qumulo, and retrieved through NeuralSearch’s natural-language interface, including inside Adobe Premiere Pro, through a NeuralSearch panel that lets an editor find and load a shot without leaving the timeline.

“Storage has spent thirty years getting better at holding frames and almost no time getting better at helping anyone find them,” said Douglas Gourlay, Chief Executive Officer, Qumulo. “Colorfront sits where the richest metadata in the entire pipeline is created and expanded. Making that information a durable property of the file, indexed and searchable from the moment it lands, changes what a storage platform is for. The picture stops being an opaque object you have to open to understand.”

“Transkoder has always known a great deal about every frame it touches, what the camera recorded, what the colourist decided, how the shot is meant to be framed and graded,” said Mark Jaszberenyi, Chief Executive Officer, Colorfront. “Until now most of that knowledge stopped being useful the moment the render finished. Writing it to the file on Qumulo, where it can be searched in plain language, means the work our software does on-set keeps paying off through editorial, VFX and finishing, and long into the archive.”

The joint workflow is in active development and will be shown as a preview at IBC 2026. Colorfront Transkoder/On-Set Dailies 2026 is available now from Colorfront. Qumulo is hosting demonstrations and meetings throughout IBC aboard the Para Todos, a restored 1924 Amsterdam tugboat docked for the week.