Remote production has introduced efficiencies, unlocked new talent opportunities and helped align stakeholders across the chain. However, ensuring every remote team member is working from an image that accurately represents the cinematographer’s intended color and look remains an imperfect art (and science). In 2025, more remote teams confronted this challenge by utilizing smarter, metadata-rich proxies and mapping camera metadata properly, therefore making transforms more predictable for remote review, editorial and VFX handoff.
These activities helped teams accelerate remote collaboration, ensuring earlier creative decisions with greater confidence. At the same time, more remote teams leaned into formats that balanced fidelity and portability, ensuring that color transforms could survive the trip through web-based delivery systems. We also saw a noticeable uptick in color pipelines that translated more predictably across hardware, software and cloud viewers.
As a result of these changes, it's now easier for DITs to design color and data pipelines with remote delivery in mind from day one. This ensures that proxies and review encodes carry the right looks, metadata and timecode information, and VFX teams receive properly-tagged material that plugs directly into their offline and conform environments. Additionally, colorists can make more informed decisions, reducing rework and preserving intent throughout the process.
Given the strides made last year, it’s safe to assume more productions will take similar steps to advance their approaches in 2026. We’ll see increased adoption of standardized proxy profiles, color transforms and metadata mappings. HDR and wide color-gamut intent will travel more predictably through remote pipelines as monitoring becomes more uniform, and remote production will start to feel less like sending approximations and more like delivering faithful, color-managed representations of the source.
DITs will increasingly function as the architects of unified pipelines, and cinematographers will see their look preserved across every viewing environment, including browser-based tools and remote monitors. Editors and colorists will inherit consistent, metadata-rich proxies that speed up both creative iteration and final finishing.
With all these developments, remote workflows will reach a new level of sophistication. The focus will no longer be just about moving files quickly, but also about preserving color science, metadata and creative intent across every hop.
Abe Abt is Senior Product Consultant at AJA (www.aja.com) in Grass Valley, CA.