Qumulo and Transkoder and On-Set Dailies developer, Colorfront, have announced a 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 collaboration is aimed at ensuring on-set metadata – camera make and model, sensor mode, resolution and frame rate, 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 – reaches the people downstream.
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.
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 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.
In the new system, once the metadata is resident on the file and indexed, retrieval stops being a browsing problem and becomes a query.
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.
Jon Creamer
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