"Hedge customers have been a driving force in our product development and roadmap from day one," said Paul Matthijs, co-founder and CEO of Hedge. "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."

EditReady, a transcoding application, now supports RAW video, including ARRI RAW, Codex HDE, ProRes RAW, and RED R3D, and Blackmagic RAW.

It isn't possible to edit RAW directly. First, it has to be processed and adjusted to a format and "look" that suits the editor and the editing workflow.

EditReady converts camera RAW footage into the Log format native to the camera manufacturer. Log workflows are simple and well established. 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.

Elements are 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.

Hedge customers reported that this is a serious and growing problem, forcing editors to spend valuable creative time naming and annotating incoming files. 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.

Canister is a drag-and-drop interface and cataloguer for LTO. It 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. This removes an entire layer of complexity from the archive process and is a massive step towards making LTO a universal archive medium for filmmakers and post-production facilities.

A benefit of Canister is that it 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.