The metadatabase – a metadata centric alternative access method to the audiovisual content stored on a general-purpose filesystem – provides a powerful basis for managing and searching large volumes of distributed files typically found in a post-production environment. The architecture of the metadatabase allows a reliable and robust representation of  the underlying filesystem in real time without compromising its integrity, access and performance. An initial API is defined, providing a convenient method to build content management and image processing applications on top of it, exploiting the vast improvements in performance derived from operating on aggregated sequence metadata.