Netherlands-born startup Hedge has released three product updates to its suite of tools for filmmakers and video professionals: Hedge Elements, EditReady RAW, and Canister Spanning.
Driven by customer demand for new features, these latest updates address common challenges today’s modern video editor faces:
- Dealing with unorganized media that requires custom-built metadata fields;
- RAW transcoding; and
- Ensuring individual media archives can span multiple LTO tapes.
Hedge Elements
Elements are Hedge’s term for the varied and customisable metadata that users can now associate (and keep) with a file to clarify the role of that file to other creative and technical professionals later in the workflow.
Crucially, people who receive files can now specify what elements of information they need to organise and process those files. They do this by creating a preset that they send to Hedge operators during the data transfer. As Hedge moves data from camera cards and other storage sources, a “review” panel will pop up to prompt the operator to insert the required data.
Presets are a way for future recipients to communicate with those responsible for sending the data to them. They ensure that files are correctly labelled. Elements can include user-inputted information and “intrinsic” data like date, etc.
EditReady RAW
EditReady is a transcoding application that now supports RAW video, including ARRI RAW, Codex HDE, ProRes RAW, and RED R3D, and Blackmagic RAW.
EditReady quickly and reliably converts camera RAW footage into the Log format native to the camera manufacturer. For NLEs that don’t support a particular flavor of RAW, film and videomakers can convert, for example, Blackmagic RAW to Apple ProRes, quickly and accurately.
Canister Spanning, Preflight Checks
LTO is an advanced storage technology that’s scalable to hold vast amounts of data. It is an ideal medium for individual filmmakers, production companies and post-production facilities to archive valuable footage.
Canister is an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface and cataloguer for LTO which now supports Spanning – the ability to span file transfers across multiple tapes.
Until now, LTO users have had to carefully assess whether their archive material will fit onto individual tapes. But now, Canister takes the friction out of the process by automatically assigning files to multiple tapes.
Canister prompts users to insert a new LTO tape when needed and keeps a catalogue of the tapes and files so that when the material has to be retrieved, the user can insert the LTO tapes required to restore the archive. This removes an entire layer of complexity from the archive process and is a step towards making LTO a universal archive medium for filmmakers and post-production facilities.
Canister doesn’t use a proprietary database to track files on LTO tapes. Software that requires a database limits the users’ ability to restore LTO tapes on other manufacturers’ systems. Instead, Canister creates a catalog of files, which becomes part of the host computer’s file system – so it’s universally available and frees up stored files from proprietary lock-ins.
Also in the new release is Preflight Checks. LTO users can find it hard to keep up with OS, interconnects, and firmware revisions. Preflight Checks helps to ensure that everything is set up and fully functional.
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