We hope your 2023 is off to a good start!

Thanks to you, the Hedge user base continues to grow and grow, and so does our range of apps and features. Because of that, we’re going to switch up our news outlets a bit; with so many new features continuously being released, we don’t want to flood your inbox with emails. So, instead of emailing you about each one separately, we’re going to do recaps here on the blog - at least a few times a year, but never more often than once a month.

Of course, if you want to stay really close to the fire, we’ll also keep posting about each release on Twitter↗, Instagram↗, Mastodon (go check out postchat.io), and LinkedIn↗, but not this detailed. Expect this blog to have special content and more that won’t be available on those channels.

Let's dive in 🚀

Hedge

Last year ended with a blast: Speed 2.0

In Hedge 22.3, all of Hedge’s various copy engines got a major tune-up. Combining multiple improvements that we researched in the last year and a half together resulted in speed jumps ranging from 20% to 250%. The best thing is that it’s all with regular gear, nothing special, so these gains are available to everyone. As usual for such a release, there’s a deep dive available on our blog. Fancy graphs guaranteed 🙂

➡️ Read up on Speed 2.0

Included in the same release are two brand new Finder and Explorer extensions, allowing you to use Hedge as a replacement for the copy/paste actions provided by your OS.

2023 is of course, well underway, and this month we already have some new features:

• Broken clip detection, for when you're camera or media has an issue
• Single Destination queuing mode
• Intelligent handling of macOS purgeable space

EditReady

2022 was obviously quite the year for EditReady, and we decided to end on a high: EditReady Pro now comes with full-blown support for Phantom CineRAW. Maybe the coolest thing about this project is the amount of amazingly awesome high-speed clips we got to test this with. Big thanks to Red Bull Media House for their assistance 🙏

Another big announcement is the pre-release of EditReady Server - a headless version of EditReady meant to be used in automated workflows, fully integrated with iconik’s ISG. Available for macOS now and coming to Windows and Linux later this year.

Wrapping up our goal to add a slew of RAW codecs to EditReady, we finally found the time to add a bunch of features that make your transcoding life a lot easier:

• If your clips don’t come with timecode, you can now automatically generate timecode from creation and modification dates.
• REDRAW transcoding can now parse and apply de-squeeze to anamorphic footage.
• The Retiming tool now supports clips at up to 100fps.

Canister

The third massive project coming to a conclusion after a year of work was adding SCSI capabilities to Canister. LTO is an amazing medium and quite hi-tech, but it has some quirks that are inherent to such technology. As LTFS and LTO can both be quite temperamental, we’ve been wanting to offer a way around those inherent rough edges for a long time.

With last week’s 23.1 release, we added a whole new SCSI backbone. As a result of that, you’ll now see a Load button when a drive is empty, a Format button that only shows up when you actually need it, and you can see tape names before mounting a tape. Another nice feature made possible by this new backbone is that it’s now possible to rename tapes. An industry first! SCSI allows us to do much more with Canister, so you'll see more and more updates in the coming year.

Canister 23.1 also adds Collections. A staple feature in Hedge for years, Collections allow you to drag and drop selections of multiple files and folders straight from Finder into Canister’s source dropzone. This allows you to archive more than just one folder per transfer.

Tied into Collections, we also added Retrieve with Full Path: when you retrieve files, you can choose to either retrieve just the files or have Canister recreate each file’s full path on the destination. Combined with the Retrieve Finder Extension, a simple Right-click > Retrieve in the Catalog might just change your world.

You’ll find some new preferences, too: it’s now possible to decide if you want to eject, unmount, or do nothing with a tape after archiving or retrieving. We also added a way to prepopulate the serial field with a timestamp during the formatting of a tape - serials are required by tape libraries but not very useful when using standalone LTO drives. By utilizing the serial field as a timestamp, you can quickly see if a tape was reformatted and when, all within your Catalog.

Mimiq

After Mimiq joined the Hedge family last Summer, we’ve been working steadily at adding more and more features to deepen the support for Media Composer on both Windows and macOS.

Newly added in January is support for Media Composer 2022.12 and support for AFP file systems. Isn’t AFP deprecated, I hear you ask? Yes, very much so - but if your QNAP or Synology was using AFP and now switches to SMB, Media Composer won’t always play ball. For those workflows, we added full AFP support to Mimiq Pro. A little tweak for Windows installations is that it’s no longer required to first install Media Composer before installing Mimiq.

On top of that, today we released official support for using LucidLink on Windows 11, adding bin locking to the RAM drive mechanism that LucidLink uses in favor of the mechanism in Windows 10.

Meet Us

We’re kicking off in-person activities in 2023 with BSC in London in February, plus our friends at iodyne will be showing the latest workflows we’ve been developing at the HPA Retreat.

April’s already getting close, so that means we’re busy prepping for NAB too. See you in Vegas? If you’ve not already registered, you can use our code LV35548 to register for a free pass. Make sure to do so before March 31st!

This year, we’ll again be located in the North Hall. Heading into the hall, pass Blackmagic's booth, go towards Adobe, take a right turn, and then a left at LiveU. Look straight ahead for the tall Dutchies in booth N3174 - right next to our friends at Symply.

Speak soon!

The Hedge team