For editors, finding the right shot can sometimes take longer than using it.
Media organizations have accumulated enormous libraries containing millions—or even billions—of assets. At the same time, production has become increasingly distributed across sets, studios, editorial environments, VFX teams, cloud infrastructure, and AI services. The challenge is no longer simply storing all that content. It’s finding the right asset when someone needs it, without interrupting the creative process.
At IBC 2026 in Amsterdam, Qumulo demonstrated a new approach to solving that problem: NeuralSearch integrated directly into Adobe Premiere Pro.
The idea is simple: instead of making editors leave their creative application to hunt through folders, storage systems, asset databases, or separate search tools, bring intelligent content discovery directly into the environment where they already work.
Search Without Leaving the Edit
With NeuralSearch inside Adobe Premiere Pro, editors can use plain-English queries to search massive media libraries directly from Premiere. They can find relevant assets, preview the results, import selected content, and insert it into their project—all without leaving the application or knowing where the underlying files physically reside.
The workflow becomes:
Search. Find. Preview. Import. Create.
That may sound like a small change, but it represents a fundamentally different approach to editorial workflows.
Traditional media environments often force editors to understand how content is organized: which project contains it, which folder it lives in, which storage system holds it, or even which location or cloud it resides in. As media libraries grow, that model becomes increasingly difficult to scale.
NeuralSearch changes the starting point. Instead of asking an editor to know where something is stored, the editor can search based on what they know about it.
From File Search to Media Intelligence
The opportunity goes far beyond filenames and directories.
Media contains an enormous amount of context: capture information, versions, ownership, rights, usage history, transcripts, AI-generated tags, technical metadata, and information contained within the content itself.
NeuralSearch brings intelligence directly to the data layer so that you can search media by structure, context, and meaning. Rather than relying solely on separate crawlers, indexes, databases, or ETL pipelines, NeuralSearch is designed to make the intelligence associated with media part of the data foundation itself.
Its architecture builds that foundation in several ways.
NeuralSearch can index file-system metadata into an open-format Parquet table compatible with Apache Iceberg, making that information accessible through natural language, SQL, or APIs. It can extract additional information from file headers and incorporate it into Qumulo's extensible metadata. And it can connect with AI services such as AWS Bedrock and Azure AI Foundry and models such as TwelveLabs to analyze media contextually and embed that intelligence back into the files.
The result is a richer, more durable source of media intelligence that creative applications, artists, AI services, and production pipelines can consume.
Why Put NeuralSearch Inside Premiere?
Because discovery should happen where creativity happens.
An editor working in Premiere shouldn't have to interrupt an edit, open another application, navigate a storage hierarchy, locate an asset, download or copy it somewhere else, and then return to the project.
With the NeuralSearch integration demonstrated at IBC, discovery becomes part of the editing experience itself.
An editor could search for the type of content they need using natural language, preview potential matches, choose the appropriate asset, and bring it directly into the project.
The underlying complexity of the media environment becomes far less important to the person creating the story.
That is the larger promise behind the integration: find the right content without leaving the creative workflow.
One Media Library, Wherever Production Happens
Search becomes even more powerful when it operates across a unified media environment.
Qumulo Cloud Data Fabric connects media across set, studio, cloud, editorial, VFX, finishing, and AI infrastructure. Media can remain accessible through the same files, paths, permissions, and metadata while Qumulo intelligently streams and caches data across production locations.
That means NeuralSearch isn't simply another search interface sitting on top of an isolated storage system. It can become a discovery layer for a much broader media estate.
Editors don't need to know whether an asset originated on set, lives in a data center, or is stored in the cloud. They need to know that the content exists—and be able to use it.
The Media Moves. The Context Stays With It.
This becomes especially important as AI plays a larger role in media production.
AI and machine learning services can enrich media through tagging, transcription, video understanding, semantic analysis, and metadata generation. But creating separate AI copies, indexes, and databases can introduce yet another layer of infrastructure and another version of the media estate to manage.
Qumulo's approach is different.
Media and its associated intelligence remain connected throughout the content lifecycle. AI services and compute can work against the same authoritative media and metadata used by production teams, rather than requiring organizations to continually create additional copies for every new workflow.
That creates a foundation where people, applications, production pipelines, and AI can work from the same media estate.
From Media Storage to Media Intelligence
The NeuralSearch integration with Adobe Premiere Pro demonstrated at IBC offers a glimpse of what happens when storage becomes more than a place where media sits.
For decades, storage infrastructure has largely been organized around a basic question: Where is the file?
For modern media production, a more useful question is: What content do I need right now?
When the data platform understands the structure, context, and meaning associated with media and can deliver that intelligence directly into the applications creatives already use, the file system itself can become part of the creative process.
That's the shift Qumulo demonstrated at IBC.
Stop searching for files. Start getting answers from your media.
And ultimately, spend less time searching and waiting and more time creating.