One of our goals for Hedge has always been to to automate the no-brainer situations. Setting Sources and Destinations over and over again definitely qualifies as one. Automating this chore makes a lot of sense, especially for those working on productions with a high card rotation.

So, today we release two features that have been on our wishlist since day 1: Auto-Source and Auto-Destination

Auto-Destination

Reconnecting drives is pretty common in video production. To make life easier for you previously used Destinations are now automatically recognized. Not just the disk, but also the Destination Folder.

Auto-Destination is persistent: if you move a Destination from one computer to another, Hedge will still recognize the drive as a Destination.

You can easily break the bond by dragging it out of Destinations, or by using it as a Source. It’s of course possible to turn off auto-recognition altogether in the Preferences:

Auto Preferences in Hedge

Auto-Source

Recognizing Sources proved to be a bit trickier. We tried many ideas:

• using drive serials (obscured by some card readers 😖)
• tracking UUIDs (not persistent)
• checking the disk’s form factor (again, obscured)
• fingerprint files (cards are reformatted)

And then it struck us ⚡️

Hedge doesn’t need to track unique disks, it only has to recognize content structures to determine if a disk is a true Source. Depending on your use case, this can be a folder structure (DSLRs, Sony) or a naming convention (RED, ARRI).

Auto-Source Folder

Many Hedge users copy just the one folder that actually contains footage: CLIPS, STREAM, 100EOS5D, }CLIPS{___....

Detecting that structure is exactly what Recents is already all about.

So we expanded it’s functionality: if a card contains a unique Recent Folder Hedge will use that as its Source Folder. Et voilà, the card is now a Source, ready to be transferred.

But what if you want to transfer a complete drive? Keep on reading:

Auto-Source Root

RED and ARRI users don’t have to go through all this folder hassle: their cameras create more useful structures of one folder per clip. Even more conveniently, they use sensible volume names like A001_123456.

In addition to Recent Folders, Hedge now has a whitelist to recognize Sources. It accepts wildcards. However, that’s not enough to make this truly useful. Using B_ would already become problematic: B* will recognize both B001_1234 but also Backup Of Whatever Project as Sources.

So we made the wildcard a bit smarter than usual: * accepts every character up to _the next defined character. This way B_\_\* will trigger on B001_1234 but not on Backup. It’s also not case-sensitive, so UNTITLED works for Untitled and untitled as well.

We’ve defined a few defaults to give you an idea of how it works, but feel free to add more wildcards in the Preferences. If you think there’s a very obvious one missing let us know.

Wrapping up

Auto-Source and Auto-Destination are huge time savers for those working on high volume productions. Both (and a lot more!) are part of the Hedge 1.8 update: Get the update here 🚀

As always, let us know how this new feature works out for you. We’re never done improving!

PS: Big thanks to Gruff Vaughan of storm&shelter for helping out with the Odyssey bits 🙏