Working together, without constraints
Mimiq is now part of the Hedge family. That’s good news for everyone, including existing Mimiq customers. Read on to find out why.
It's a natural instinct for editors to work together on a video production. For Media Composer users, Mimiq enables collaborative editing without having to buy into Avid’s proprietary NEXIS hardware.
Avid Media Composer burst onto the video editing scene over thirty years ago. It was a giant leap from the tape-based systems of the time, quickly becoming the standard for broadcasters and filmmakers. Back then, every single part of the NLE was controlled by Avid. Fine-tuning and choosing the right components, including storage, was the only way to get enough performance for video, and required a lot of skill and knowledge.
Today could hardly be more different, with a plethora of inexpensive high-performing third-party storage options and a wide range of Macs and PCs to chose from.
Bin Locking
The key to collaborative editing is a very simple idea. You need to prevent having two people working on the same thing, at the same time. If that happens, file corruption is bount to occur. So, it's essential to be able to stop someone else from overwriting your files while you're still working on an edit. And the way you do that with Avid is with Bin Locking.
With your media bins locked, someone else trying to get into your project will see a red lock indicator, which means "you can look in here but you can’t modify anything". When you're done, the lock is released, and other editors can get in to the edit and add to or modify your work.
That sounds simple, but it’s not if the NLE vendor locks that feature down to its own line of shared storage: NEXIS. It's a really great piece of hardware, but also quite costly compared to other options; the market for NASs is quite crowded to say the least 😁
So, people tried to get around that baked-in limitation and multiple parties succeeded. Avid acknowledged this effort by adding an official "third-party storage" moniker to its software.
The caveat: most of these are hardware manufacturers, whose goal it is to sell NASs. Bin locking without NEXIS, but still a vendor lock-in. Or, they'd offer the solution at a crazy price point, defeating the purpose.
However, there's one exception: Mimiq, developed by Indiestor. Also a NAS vendor, but one that chose not to go down the vendor lock-in path.
Last year, as we developed Bin Locking for cloud storage, allowing remote editors to use LucidLink and Postlab's own Drive as shared storage for Media Composer, it became apparent that remote teams do not solely work remote: there's still a heap of work done in-house, on premise, and a lot of productions are a mix of both: hybrid workflows.
We realized there could be good synergy between our respective technologies; Indiestor didn't have the bandwidth to bring Mimiq to the cloud, and we at Hedge could learn a lot from the long and winding road that Indiestor had to travel to make Mimiq the leading solution in the space.
So, Mimiq is now a Hedge app. Rebuilt from the ground up, it's a completely new app that is future-proof and built to last - and available today 🎉
There's an alternative
Mimiq makes Media Composer believe it's talking to a Nexis system. It really is that simple. Media Composer Ultimate is already fluent in collaborative editing: you don't have to add anything apart from Mimiq to make it work. The key advantage that Mimiq offers is that you can choose your own storage instead of buying proprietary hardware (or expensive storage from vendors of other collaborative editing platforms). That means anything with the speed and capacity to cope with your project's media works.
The freedom to choose your own storage is transformative, and there are some outstanding storage options out there. There's never been a better time for you to roll your own storage and use it with Mimiq.
Apple silicon-native, Mac and Windows
This is a new version of Mimiq, and as we're always on the front of all new tech, Mimiq is fully Apple Silicon-native. That means it’s compatible with all of Apple's current stable of processors, and also with the older ones. Another thing we do differently at Hedge is that each app that is available on both Mac and Windows, has its own dedicated native codebase - only the vision is shared between operating systems, not the code. That allows us to give you the best native experience, whether you're on Mac or on Windows.
Easy Licensing
One downside of having hardware companies develop software, is that they approach licensing from a hardware standpoint. In the case of Mimiq, licenses were tied down to MAC addresses. That was fine when you bought a computer to work on for 5+ years. But today, many editors have multiple computers and need to be able to move licenses around at a whim. The new Mimiq has all the Hedge licensing goodness - unlimited portability of activations between computers, multi-activation licenses so not everyone needs their own license key, and even granular remote deactivation through our online License Manager.
Wider Support
Now that Mimiq is part of the Hedge family it will be developed, maintained, and supported by us. That means you'll get the same responsive support across time zones as we're famous for with our other products. And it's not just about customer support - it extends to OS support: as with all our apps, we support Mimiq all the way back to four major macOS versions. As Mimiq is tied to Media Composer, we're also 100% on par with those supported versions – if Avid supports it, we support it.
Some questions about Mimiq, answered
If you're already a Mimiq user, this is useful information for you:
- What happens to my existing Mimiq license?
It will continue to work as is. If you purchased it within 12 months, you'll continue to receive support for it through us, together with Indiestor.
- Can I uprade to the new Mimiq?
Yes, we're offering all legacy customers a custom discount. If you haven't received an email about it already, reach out and we'll get you going.
- Will I be able to move my legacy Mimiq license?
Legacy Mimiq licenses allowed for being moved to a new computer once. That still applies - you can reach out to Indiestor to get your license registered to your new computer. That said, Upgrade to Mimiq if you prefer a much easier way to manage and move licenses.
- Why is legacy Mimiq End Of Life?
Because the technology in legacy Mimiq is not compatible with Apple silicon: both the app and the underlying technology required a complete rewrite.
- Our company has legacy Mimiq, and we need to add licenses. Is this possible?
We can't issue new legacy licenses, but we can help you with a crossgrade to the new Mimiq. It's a drop-in replacement so it will not hinder your workflow in any way.
- I bought legacy Mimiq less than a year ago.
If you purchased legacy Mimiq in July 2022 or later, we'll reach out with a free crossgrade license. All other customers can continue to use Mimiq as is, and we'll reach out with a significant discount offer to crossgrade your license at any given time.
A different era
It's a very different era from when Media Composer first arrived in 1989. Remarkably, the paradigm for non-linear editing, largely defined by Avid thirty-three years ago, hasn't changed as much as you'd expect. But everything is bigger: storage, bandwidth, resolution, processor speed, etc. Even so, today's NLE would probably seem familiar to even the earliest users. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
But Mimiq represents a significant advance, a step change, if you like. It lets you build your Media Composer installation without the expensive lock-in of proprietary storage. You’re free to choose whatever storage type and configuration suits you best. You can work efficiently alongside your colleagues while collaborating on the same productions.
Mimiq is part of Hedge's bigger vision, which aims to remove friction from workflows. Removing the friction, the error-prone manual tasks, isn’t limited to software design: reducing financial inertia is just as important. Commoditizing workflows means overcoming financial burdens, and creating a more equal and accessible playing field for every creative, throughout the world.
By allowing Mimiq users to choose their own storage, to work together with other editors, we get closer to this ideal. And we give editors and other creative stakeholders their time back to spend on making their productions even better.
The new Mimiq is available immediately, and comes with a no-frills 10-day trial. If you're an Avid editor with Media Composer Ultimate, be sure to give it a go: