AI Startup Colibri
Colibri is an AI-powered media management and search platform developed by Jonas Trottnow, Research Engineer AI and part of the core team of the Carl Laemmle Institute (CLI), in cooperation with Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.
The project addresses a growing challenge in film and media production: productions generate large amounts of video, audio, images and documents, but finding and reusing the actual content hidden within these files remains difficult. Colibri uses multimodal AI to understand this content and make it searchable in natural language – without requiring files to be uploaded to external AI services.
Instead of replacing existing storage and production systems, Colibri adds an intelligent layer across existing project folders, workstations, file servers and archives.
Objectives
Colibri explores how local AI can make large and heterogeneous media collections accessible while maintaining control over sensitive and copyrighted material. Its main principles are:
- Understand and search media content: Automatically analyse video, audio, images and documents, including visual content, speech, people and other relevant information.
- Work locally: AI analysis and search run on the user’s own hardware. Production material does not need to be transferred to external AI services.
- Scale to large archives: Computationally intensive analysis can be distributed across multiple workstations or dedicated machines, allowing existing hardware to jointly process large collections.
- Enable team collaboration: Collections can be shared between team members while accommodating distributed storage and different working environments.
- Talk to your material: A conversational interface allows users to ask questions about their collections. Answers are grounded in the indexed material and linked back to the corresponding source and position in the original media.
The aim is to turn media archives from passive storage into actively accessible knowledge while keeping both the material and its AI processing under the control of its owners.
Target Group
Colibri is aimed at professionals and organisations working with substantial amounts of audiovisual material – including filmmakers, documentary productions, production companies, post-production facilities, studios, research and educational institutions, and audiovisual archives.
It is particularly relevant where media collections span many projects, users or years and where cloud-based AI processing is undesirable. The underlying approach can also extend beyond film wherever heterogeneous media collections need to remain searchable, reusable and locally controlled.
Colibri is currently in beta and is being developed and tested with users from film, media production and archival environments.
Further information is available on the Colibri website.
Colibri and its cooperation with Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg were also introduced at FMX 2026 as part of the presentation of the Carl Laemmle Institute.