Presets
Organize your organizing, in Hedge 20.3
2021-01-29 – Now also available for Windows!
Building on last year's Filter & Rename release, this may be the biggest update to Hedge in quite a while: Presets.
Here's an example of the power of Presets: get rid of a Sony card structure, and save only the .MP4 files an A7 creates:
You can enable or disable a Preset per transfer, right within Hedge - no need to go into the Preferences:
Switching Presets it just as easy:
Counters
We feel that Hedge's Source Counter has always had a few rough edges: it was linked to the Sources panel, so it didn't know the difference between cards from an A or B cam. We realized that to make counters work predictably, they should be linked to Presets instead. So, as part of this update, we have overhauled the Source Counter:
- Each preset has its own independent counter. Set its value in the Prefs.
- Counters can have as many digits as you want (42, 042, 0042, ...). Just prepend zeros and Hedge will adhere to your format.
If you have a Preset that uses {Source Counter}, no worries: Hedge still understands it, and will treat is just as it would treat the new Counter.
The Default Dilemma
Presets can be a devil in disguise. Presets are very powerful but are also obtrusive and confusing if you don't use them very often. Should we bother you with a default preset like a lot of apps do? We don't think so - presets should only show up when you actually have one.
If you start from scratch and make your first change in the Organization panel, click Save as Preset, you'll see it pop up when doing a Transfer. From that moment on, all other changes made to presets are autosaved. Presets can easily be duplicated in-app, and you can rename, edit, and share them directly in Finder:
Au-to-mate 🤖
Hedge Presets are an open standard: they're tiny text files, with a JSON structure, making it easy to share them with co-workers, or to prep a production and hand off your settings to an assistent. Double-clicking a preset will load it as the active preset, and if a preset with the same name already exists, it's updated immediately.
We've built Presets so that it not only supports Organization settings - we've also added functionality to control Hedge's API, sources and destinations, manage metadata, set up Script locations, activate licenses, and define app settings. We're not yet sharing the specifications for using all this advanced preset wizardry, but it's available on request. We use it ourselves to test Hedge, and some of our customers are using it to deploy temp licenses to third party contractors - where the preset offers a one-click setup that even activates Hedge for the user.
If you want to incorporate Hedge's advanced Automation options into your production workflow, please reach out for details.
Available Today
Presets are available for Hedge users on MacOS. Update in-app to 20.3, or download a fresh install directly: