The future of PostLab

Paul Matthijs Lombert -

Hi there,

Paul here - Hedge's CEO.

We’re ready to share some really exciting news about the next steps of PostLab's evolution. Maybe you’ve already heard some bits about it around IBC or the Creative Summit, maybe you haven't, so I wanted to take a moment to get you up to speed and finally make our news official.  

There's a lot to unpack, so here's the Too-Long-Didn't-Read:

TLDR; a new PostLab is coming, and it's no longer just for FCP and Premiere Pro. It's also no longer a subscription but a perpetual license. The current PostLab will stay available until everyone has migrated, and we'll be reaching out to make sure you'll switch over without any hiccups.

For easy reference, if you need to come back here later, here's a table of contents:

Let's dive in!

The new PostLab

We have spent the last few years thinking long and hard about what individual’s and team’s pain points really are and what is truly costing creative professionals the most amount of time and aggravation in modern workflows. As a result, at NAB we'll be releasing PostLab 2.0 and we think nothing will ever be the same for your workflow.

This is not just a major update; PostLab 2.0 is a completely new app, written from the ground up, to allow us to make a gigantic leap in collaboration for creatives. It's a command center that allows you to take control of your apps, projects, versioning, collaboration, and content pipelines all in one place. Every aspect of your team’s in-person, remote, and hybrid workflows for any project or system that you use it with will be positively impacted.

PostLab 2.0 is more than just a software release. We've set out to build a worldwide operating system for your creative workflow. It is a hub for your creative team and a responsive central nervous system for your projects that simplifies repetitive tasks and media management in ways that will save your team hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars a year in lost productivity.

Whether you’re a jack of all trades freelancer, a worldwide video team, a cross discipline multimedia production company, or you’re building a reusable media library for a school, organization, or corporation, the new PostLab has rethought the way workflows, apps, and collaborators can work together to make everything start to flow effortlessly.

At its core PostLab 2.0 offers the same functionality that the current PostLab (we'll be calling it PostLab Classic moving forward) offers: workflow and collaboration management through version control management. How it achieves that, however, is completely different. Let's have a look at what's important for you to know.

Wide App Support

We built PostLab 2.0 to be for the whole creative team; not just for video editors but for the sound department, designers, colorists, VFX, motion, and finishing artists too. PostLab 2.0 is no longer just for Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro editors. It will support all creative apps, and then some. This first release will only be scratching the surface of what you will be able to control and customize as you begin to use this platform, and the workflows that will become available to you will be endless.

PostLab 2.0 works for all kinds of documents, and creative apps get a special treatment. Out of the box, it will fully support the entire Apple Pro Apps suite: Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Motion, but also apps like Pages and Numbers. A wide range of Adobe apps will also be supported, and we're building support for other apps and also for folder-based projects that tools like ProTools use. And that's just the beginning.

Event Locking

Final Cut Pro is the origin point for PostLab, and with PostLab 2.0, we're revisiting our roots. A big part of our research in the last two years has gone into a patent-pending industry-first feature: Event Locking.

Working very much like Avid's bin locking, Event Locking allows Final Cut Pro users to access Events while other editors are working on them. PostLab manages the locking process to prevent two editors making conflicting changes to the same event.

On top of that, PostLab 2.0 makes it possible to share Events across libraries. Now you can for instance use a single SFX Event across all your productions, without having to have numerous duplicate Events and losing track of which one is the newest. If one person on the team update the Event, all others get to load the changes too.

We've learned from our Beta Track program that Event Locking & Sharing offer enormous flexibility. To ensure you have ample time to get a grasp on the possibilities, PostLab 2.0 will offer a choice to enable Event Locking, or to just work with the Library Locking functionality you're already familiar with in PostLab Classic.

No More Subscriptions

Another massive change: PostLab will no longer be a subscription. Instead, PostLab 2.0 works with license keys, just like any of our other apps. A PostLab 2.0 license is a perpetual license, and comes with a year of updates and support. The number of concurrent users is based on the number of activations added to your license key, and can have any amount of activations.

A single license will cost the same as our current PostLab Yearly subscriptions. After a year, you decide for yourself if you want to extend your license to get access to ongoing updates, new features, and technical support. You'll never lose functionality or access if you don't extend your license.

Licensing will be completely flexible: our Project Licenses allow businesses to pay monthly for their licenses, with the choice of having them automatically renew each month, or be limited to a predefined period of time on a project-by-project basis. Additionally, we are consolidating Solo, Team, Pro, and Enterprise plans to now be only available as Standard and Pro options:

Standard - for teams that want peace of mind above everything else. You're collaborating on both creative and non-creative apps. You work on-prem, and PostLab Classic's Library Locking and Relink Prevention are all your editors need.
Pro - for teams that want to supercharge their workflow, and work locally or remotely. Out of the gate PostLab Pro ships with Event Locking & Sharing for Final Cut Pro, support for LucidLink, and in a near future similar functionality for Premiere Pro and other apps. Next up is media management, production management, integrations, and a S3-native back-end.

We'll be in touch to help you determine which option is best for you. As you'll see in a moment, it will be pretty straightforward.

Hybrid Collaboration

Modern workflows need extreme flexibility. Whether you're on-prem, hybrid, or a purely remote team, PostLab 2.0 is designed for this from the ground up. Team members on the new platform will know no boundaries. Working locally, offline, online, remote, or any of the above all at the same time whenever and however you want is the new standard.

PostLab 2.0 no longer creates a bundle per production, but has bundles on a team level. Team bundles can be stored locally (if you work by yourself), on shared storage for in-house teams, or on cloud storage like LucidLink, for remote collaboration. Later in 2024, PostLab 2.0 will also become S3 Native, enabling remote work via an S3 bucket you own.

All of this means PostLab no longer requires servers; only storage. Your IT and OpSec departments will thank you for that, we think. Of course, we'll help teams with migrating and help you create an action plan.

Drive

When COVID hit, it became immediately clear that sharing media was a massive problem. Together with LucidLink, we brought you Drive. Four years later, remote storage has matured quite a bit. As was our goal from the get-go, many you have by now outgrown Drive and have moved to their own LucidLink accounts, or are using alternatives.

That's why PostLab 2.0 no longer has a Drive or related cloud storage functionality. We're going to help each team that works remotely to transition to their own LucidLink account or alternative solution, for storing both your media and your PostLab bundles. To help with your migration plan, we’ll be offering each one of you a complimentary OffShoot Pro project license to make it easy to safely migrate your Drive's contents to a LucidLink Filespace or other location.

What About Avid

As Mimiq is vastly superior to PostLab's Remote Locking functionality for Media Composer, most teams that have been using Remote Locking by now have migrated to a workflow using Mimiq and LucidLink. The few that haven't we're already actively reaching out to. At some point, PostLab 2.0 will support Avid and offer advanced media management, but for bin locking, Mimiq is the way to go.

Together

The PostLab team will work directly with you to facilitate moving your workflow from PostLab Classic to PostLab 2.0. In the coming weeks, our team will be reaching out to each of you to scope out how we can get you going, and where you can use our help.

We aim to have everyone migrated by September 2024, with a technical hard stop at the end of the year. In the meantime, PostLab Classic is not going anywhere.

Even when, at some point, PostLab Classic's cloud environment is no longer available, you will keep access to your data; we'll release an update that allows you to continue to use PostLab Classic to access bundles offline, to export them, and to import them into PostLab 2.0.

Many PostLab teams are on yearly plans. With the goal of moving everyone to Postlab 2.0 before September in mind, what happens if your plan is valid past that date? We'll take any remaining credit into account, and reimburse teams through a discount on new PostLab 2.0 licenses and a partial refund where it concerns prepaid Drive storage. We know everyone's situation and workflow varies so we'll make sure to take your's into account.

Next Steps

We're super excited to show you PostLab 2.0 (really, we're stoked!) and are looking forward to working with you on the next step in your workflow.  We will be demoing the new version in full at NAB; if you coming to Vegas, simply contact our team there - we're in South Lower, at SL10079. We'll schedule a test drive for you and your team and talk you through any and all questions you may have.

Simply put, the new PostLab is a breakthrough product that is the first of its kind; there is no other piece of software like it on the market. It is such a leap forward over existing solutions that we haven’t even scratched the surface of truly understanding how our customers are going to fully take advantage of this new tool… we are very excited to see what you will create.

Our goal is to help creative professionals create things in ways they never thought possible. PostLab is the workflow platform designed to make that experience faster and easier than it has ever been before.

On behalf of the entire Hedge team, we are beyond proud of this release, and we can't wait to show it to you at NAB.  You can schedule an appointment with us here. Can't come to Vegas? Wait for our email, or keep a look out for the announcement of the Q&A webinars that we'll host after NAB.

All the best,

Paul