Hedge & Codex 6

Or: Stop worrying about drive space and start loving HDE

Short Version: if you work with Codex, update to Hedge 21.3 🚀

If you work with ARRI and Hedge, chances are you’re using Codex.

Although we never officially supported Codex in Hedge, life was simple. Codex’s ultra fast storage combined with our offload technology made data management a breeze.

That is not changing. Au contraire, it’s getting much better: today, we’re upping the ante with a copy engine that’s specifically made for Codex.

Codex?

For those not familiar with Codex: it is a recording system that allows you to capture higher data rates than regular storage media is capable of recording.

One of the ways Codex manages this is by recording onto RAIDed flash storage. By storing the sensor’s data stream onto the flash storage directly, there is none of the usual overhead of a file system — there is no time lost waiting for creating, opening and closing files, thus allowing for more data to be written each second.

When the time comes to offload, your OS does require a file system. Without it, you’d end up with a single huge chunk of useless data. So, upon connecting the storage to a Mac, Codex’ Device Manager detects this and uses its own driver to present the drive as a file system. This way you’re able to offload your media as if it’s a regular hard drive.

High Density Encoding

This intermediate step creates an interesting possibility: imagine what you can do with data, if there is no actual file present on a drive; only its contents. You could represent the data as whatever you want it to be, while dynamically creating the files.

Codex realized this too, and came up with a new way of encoding the raw data that ARRI cameras produce. Codex calls this process HDE, and the end result is a much, much smaller file. It’s instantly recognizable as it is not an .ari file, but an .arx file. ARX files can be processed natively in most NLEs. When decoded back to ARRIRAW files, they end up being identical, so there’s not really a reason no to to use it. You’ll save a lot of storage and time spent backing up.

The latter is made possible by a new copy engine that is tailor made for Codex. It doesn’t only handle HDE, but is also optimized for ARRIRAW, and is available in Hedge 21.3, on the Mac ✨

Important Stuff

• As of today, we’re officially supporting Codex in Hedge. Every update we release is tested with in-house Codex hardware, and we’re actively involved in testing betas of Device Manager. A first result of this is that indexing Codex drives has been sped up dramatically.
• Each future update of Device Manager will be matched with an update of Hedge. To make sure you get the most out of your Codex gear, be sure to be on the latest version of both. As always, do not update during a production.
• Older versions of Device Manager are not compatible with Hedge. If, for some reason, you really, really, need to use a Codex Device Manager version that is older than 6.0, there is only one exception: use Device Manager 5 with any Hedge newer than 19.4 — all other versions and drivers, Codex 4.7 in particular, will not work properly.