All good things come in threes

EditReady, FoolCat, and OffShoot all get a major update

At Hedge, our goal has always been to help our users bridge the gaps between the different stages in your workflow by bringing you apps that work with you, not against you through robust functionality and beautiful simplicity. As handing off your work to the next person along the line is just as important, we ensure you don’t need to simply throw your files over the hedge and hope for the best!

Today we’re taking that another step further by adding new features and integrations to OffShoot, FoolCat and EditReady in three new 24.1 releases 🚀

At Hedge, we position our apps as building blocks so you use them as you see fit or as your workflow evolves. In many creative workflows, the juggling act between the tasks of offloading, reporting and transcoding media can create a great deal of unnecessary friction.

Whether it’s dancing between a multitude of different software made by different vendors, finding your way around a huge app with many layers, or simply finding the most straightforward solution for your specific workflow needs, it can be time-consuming enough sifting through the options. We understand that frustration - and we’re here to help.

With these new 24.1 releases, we’re closing even more gaps in your creative workflow, bringing you ultimate flexibility when offloading files, reporting what’s been shot, and transcoding to prepare the files for the next stage of your flow.

Let’s have a look at all that’s new:

OffShoot

By far the most requested feature has arrived in OffShoot 24.1: being able to Stop & Resume transfers, to pick them back up later.

Need to stop an offload and start it up again later? OffShoot will know exactly where it was stopped and where to pick it up from without needing to redo any settings, locations or parameters. Offshoot will keep things moving exactly as you left it.

This brand-new functionality  makes it easy when the need arises to quickly move your setup between locations or when you need to manually wrangle the priority of offloads.

Besides relocations, Stop & Resume also supports resuming transfers that are in a less happy state. Unplugged a drive by accident? Just reconnect your drive, and OffShoot will resume where it left off. If a dock with multiple Untitled cards was reconnected, OffShoot will know which cards are which, and continue all transfers in the correct manner. The same is true for transfers with source issues; just hit resume and you’ll be in a good place soon.

Local connection woes are a nuisance, but when it comes to network and cloud connections, dropouts are even more common. For OffShoot Pro users, the Stop & Resume functionality is a blessing when uploading to the cloud. Especially on location, with limited bandwidth or struggling connections this update will keep you going.

OffShoot’s new integration with EditReady also allows you to become a champion in keeping the work flowing by automatically triggering transcodes from your media transfer destination folder. As soon as it’s been transferred, organized, and data verified by OffShoot, it can signal EditReady to open up and start transcoding. This is a perfect way to create proxy files or align varying camera files to your chosen codec ready for the edit. No switching between apps or redoing paths required!

With the launch of OffShoot Pro, we set the sky as the limit with support for AWS S3 buckets. Our implementation, built together with AWS, removed a lot of complexity by treating buckets as if they were locally attached drives. An industry-first, OffShoot Pro allows for all your offloads to exist within the same application; cloud, network, and local.

Now, we’ve turned it up another notch. On top of AWS S3 functionality, we’re adding support for S3 Accelerated Transfer Uploads. When you enable this functionality on your AWS buckets, speeds can be increased by over 200%. Obviously, this will be on a case-by-case and connectivity basis, but many companies using this AWS feature on their buckets have reported similar speed increases. Amazon has made a great Speed Comparison tool, available here.

Throughout our development and testing of OffShoot Pro we started with the core for AWS S3 and provided a generic setting for a wider set of S3-compliant cloud services. With more workflows integrating with the cloud, or in many cases moving to the cloud completely, OffShoot Pro has proven to be a game changer for offloading to cloud S3 destinations.

Instead of needing to first copy and verify to a physical drive before uploading to the cloud, OffShoot Pro makes it possible to simultaneously offload to local and cloud storage. Productions can immediately offload and verify to their cloud destination just as easily, as if it were a drive connected to their machines. For workflows that are cloud-based, this can speed up the post production process and keep things moving at full speed ahead.

By popular request, in this 24.1 release we’ve added BackBlaze B2 cloud storage. This is the first of the support for a wider set of S3 cloud providers. We’re already working with many and have some more specialist ones in development. Let us know which provider you’d like to see, so we can qualify it for a future release.

As we build tools that look forward to the MovieLabs 2030 vision which we demonstrated with AWS at IBC 2023, we’re making sure that we are building these to also fit within existing workflows.

FoolCat

With FoolCat 24.1, your camera reports can look even better with Rec.709 transforms and 3D LUT support.

Chances are, your workflow involves working with some sort of RAW video format, or at the very least, video files shot in Log.

These are fantastic for capturing the maximum dynamic range and set that can be transformational for color grading flexibility, but straight out of camera, they’re not always the prettiest images to look at, especially when it comes to creating thumbnails for a camera report.

When making camera reports, you always want to keep things looking succinct, informative and pretty. FoolCat has always been a champ at this, but now it's even better.

FoolCat 24.1 makes it easy to keep the RAW and Log video clips in your camera reports to look their best with RAW to Rec.709 processing. If your project calls for a custom show LUT, FoolCat can apply it so your reports match exactly what everyone has been watching on set.

This new functionality builds from Hedge’s Color Awareness technology and allows users to process their RAW clips, via the camera vendors' color science, to REC.709 thumbnails within the camera report. This takes away the desaturated and washed-out look that would be contained in the thumbnails when working with RAW and replaces it with a version showing the shot in its full REC.709 glory.

Whether it’s RAW or Log footage, this can all be set up within FoolCat and triggered on the fly by OffShoot’s FoolCat integration when your offloading and verification is complete. This powerful feature allows you to bring more value to the workflow, saving time during the offloading process. It’s now much easier to go from Offloading to Reporting, all seamless and automatic, knowing nothing bogs down as the media keeps flowing.

FoolCat on Windows

As promised, we are continuing to bridge the gap between Windows and Mac users. In this release, we are bringing Sony X-OCN codec support to Windows users.

Just as when we added this codec for Mac users, this is a free update for everyone with a license that’s purchased or extended in the last twelve months.

As both X-OCN and 3D LUT support were so widely requested, we’re offering all existing and new users on both Mac and Windows a $20 discount on extending or purchasing their license, to gain access to this latest update.  

Pro tip: it’s worth checking out your current Hedge Fund balance in the License Manager. Hedge Funds are a personal credit that’s automatically awarded for each Hedge purchase, and can be used for extending licenses and buying new ones. If you’re a customer already, changes are that you have a Hedge Fund that gets you a bigger discount for extending your FoolCat license!

EditReady

As part of the 24.1 release, we have made significant optimizations under EditReady’s hood, speeding up transcoding by a landslide.

For Apple silicon users, the majority will see 2x increases in performance, with M2 Ultra and M3 users seeing up to 4x increases in performance. This obviously results in driving down transcode times, and keeps things moving in time sensitive workflows.

Along with this, EditReady 24.1 adds new codec support for Avid’s DNxHD OP-Atom MXF format. OP-Atom files are made up of separate files for audio and video, which if made with EditReady will automagically link up in Media Composer. This removes the need for AMA completely. EditReady 24.1 also includes a preset for DNxHR LB Avid Proxies, allowing you to generate small and efficient proxy files. LB proxies require less bandwidth to upload and less space in cloud storage, which makes them perfect for remote workflows.

With these additions and leveraging OffShoot’s new EditReady integration, it’s now seamless to transition from offloading to transcoding. This speeds up workflows of all shapes and sizes by cutting down on the effort it usually takes to prepare your offloaded source media for an editor.

You’ll no longer need to manually re-wrangle all of your offloaded media back into another program for Transcoding or redo your paths and folder structures to ensure your transcodes stay organized. Instead, with OffShoot and EditReady, it’s now a matter of set and forget, with the apps doing all the heavy lifting!

The Workflow Trinity

These powerful new updates and integrations being added across OffShoot, FoolCat and EditReady are designed with the key goal of reducing friction within your creative workflow, no matter how simple or complex it may be.

With OffShoot, it’s easy to manage and organize your media at the point of offload. Use FoolCat to create beautiful, branded camera reports, and finally, utilize EditReady to generate proxies or align your mezzanine codecs to automatically tee up the next stages of your workflow.

If your workflow begins and ends with simply offloading data, and you need a robust way to ensure all files are accounted for and verified before passing the torch, OffShoot is up to the task all by itself.

However, if your workflow requires you to pass along not only verified source material, but also transcodes of that same material that are…well…”edit ready”… then you can easily begin incorporating EditReady and our new awesome integration in OffShoot into your workflow, without having to maneuver between different pieces of software.

Need to throw in a camera report with those transcodes to send to the rest of your production team? Good news, incorporate OffShoot’s FoolCat integration and your beautiful camera report will be ready moments later!

Each app can always be used on its own as needed, while these powerful integrations give users flexibility in how they orchestrate their workflow, no matter how simple or complex.