Hedge Delivers Product Updates – Hedge Elements, EditReady RAW and Canister Spanning

Software Update

by Olaf von VossFebruary 1^st, 2022

Hedge is a popular solution for transferring and organizing your valuable footage and creating checksum-verified backups (read article here). But that’s not all: Hedge has released three updates to its suite of tools: Hedge Elements, EditReady RAW, and Canister Spanning.

According to Hedge, these latest updates address common problems such as dealing with unorganized media that requires custom-built metadata fields, RAW transcoding, and ensuring individual media archives can span across multiple LTO tapes.

From their press release:

Hedge customers have been a driving force in our product development and roadmap from day one. These product releases are a direct result of their most popular (and persistent) requests, and customers actively helped in testing these releases in their workflows. Today, we’re proud to announce Hedge Elements, EditReady RAW, and Canister Spanning and Preflight Checks: three major updates that we can pretty much guarantee will make your life as a video professional easier.

Paul Matthijs, co-founder and CEO of Hedge

Hedge Elements

Elements is Hedge’s term for the varied and customizable 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.

It’s very important to keep track of files: Knowing what they’re for, where they came from and why they’re important is a critical part of a modern video workflow. According to Hedge, the term “metadata” is not consistently defined across roles and departments. For a camera operator, metadata means camera, reel number and lens data. An editor refers to scene/take numbers as metadata. A colorist needs information about the color space used…. The list goes on.

So to ensure that video files always have the correct information, tailored to the specific needs of an individual workflow, this release of Hedge introduces Elements.

Crucially, people who receive files can now specify what elements of information they need to organize 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.

So Elements makes sure that everything the recipient of the files in question needs in terms of provided metadata will be gathered along the way. This approach seems pretty neat and clutter-free to me!

EditReady RAW

Another tool from Hedge is called EditReady, and it has been taking care of video transcoding for an astonishing 14 years… and with the latest update it is now ready to process RAW files as well. This includes formats like ARRI RAW, Codex HDE, ProRes RAW and RED R3D, as well as Blackmagic RAW. The latest version, which is also the first new version of EditReady since it became part of Hedge, solves the problem of quickly converting RAW footage to an editable format (according to Hedge, Sony and Canon RAW formats are “on the way”).

EditReady does this by converting camera RAW footage into the Log format native to the camera manufacturer. Once done, you can easily edit the exported files using your favorite NLE without having to worry about RAW support.

This is particularly interesting as we now have another option in addition to the just announced deal from ATOMOS, who offer a full license of ASSIMILATE Player Pro with their Ninja V/V+ monitors/recorders for transcoding ProRes RAW to more NLE-friendly formats.

Canister Spanning

Canister is an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface and cataloguer for LTO backups. With this new update, it now supports Spanning – the ability to span file transfers across multiple LTO tapes. LTO is an advanced storage technology that’s scalable to hold vast amounts of data. It is (still) used by lots of production companies and post-production facilities to archive valuable footage.

Usually, LTO users have to carefully assess whether their archive material will fit onto individual tapes. Canister solves this by automatically assigning files to multiple tapes. Canister prompts users to insert a new LTO tape when needed and keeps a catalog 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.

Also in the new release: 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.

All in all, this release tries to ensure for a hassle-free LTO backup experience without the need to worry about all the technical complexity that comes with it.

Pricing

Hedge is $139 for a single perpetual license with one year worth of upgrades, a renewal is $69 for another year. That way, you can (but don’t have to) upgrade to the latest version and therefore get the latest features.

EditReady RAW is $79 for single license, or you can get a bundle with Hedge and EditReady RAW for $189.

Finally, Canister is $299 for a single license and, again, a year worth of updates. A renewal is $99 for another year but, again, you never have to upgrade if you don’t want to.

Links: Hedge | Elements (Blog Post) | EditReady RAW (Blog Post) | Canister Spanning (Blog Post)

Do you use any Hedge’s tools? Share your experiences in the comments below!