Coming soon from PostLab: Final Cut Pro event locking for collaboration

Final Cut Pro doesn’t have bins – it has events. Final Cut Pro events hold media and timelines.

The way that collaboration works now for teams of Final Cut Pro editors, assistant editors and others is through using transfer libraries and the third-party PostLab service from Hedge.

As documented in Alex Snelling’s ‘Final Cut Pro Shared & Remote Solutions 2021’ white paper for Frame.io

Essentially PostLab takes the transfer library concept and manages it in the background, using its own cloud storage, allowing users to concentrate on the (editing) job in hand.

In Final Cut Pro terms, PostLab works by syncing multiple users’ local libraries to and from its cloud storage, managing access and tracking changes. The idea is to use PostLab to open and close Final Cut Pro libraries, work as normal within Final Cut Pro (using local libraries) and then go back to Postlab to share your session.

In a new video yesterday by the Office Hours team streamed live from the NAB 2023 show floor, Paul Matthijs of Hedge announced big changes to Hedge, PostLab and other Hedge products.

Most of the big Hedge news is listed in a new blog post on the Hedge website.

What isn’t yet on Hedge’s site is that a future version of PostLab will allow event locking.

The embedded video below jumps straight to the part of the interview about PostLab. The video is a recording of Office Hours’ daily two hour technology show.

Here is a transcript of the conversation between Felipe Baez and Paul Matthijs of Hedge:

Paul Matthijs
PostLab is our version control system for Final Cut Pro and Premiere editors. And it’s been around for quite some years. It’s been used by a lot of editors that, well, with Final Cut Pro, you don’t have any collaboration features. So it’s the only way to actually do collaboration, but it’s on a Library level and we’re now revealing that we’re building a new PostLab that can actually do that on an Event level for Final Cut Pro.

Felipe Baez
Okay. This is big news because I have a lot of friends that have been texting me and sending messages in forums saying, Hey, we’ve been hearing that Hedge is making a new version of PostLab. So what type of details? I mean, what is it exactly that we can do with Event locking that we can’t do with a Library lock?

Paul
Well, let’s take a step back to the problem of collaboration, is that it’s completely dependent on the cloud. So it’s also a component on a dependent on subscriptions, and we want to get rid of that. So PostLab currently is subscription because it needs a server component. The new PostLab that we are building is serverless. So it can work locally, it can work on shared storage, but can also can use Amazon S3 as remote storage where you control the storage yourself and so there is no vendor lock in.

On top of that you get what we call Event locking, and it’s a big paradigm shift for Final Cut Pro editors where you no longer work in a Library, but we just give you a list of all the Events that you have and you can cherry pick the set of events that you want to work in.

We create an ad-hoc library. That’s what you work in. When you’re done, we save the events back so that other editors on your team know which events you are working on. So it’s not all events in the library are locked to all of them. It’s only the ones that you want to work on that day. [If someone is working in an event, they] can open a copy of that event and still use that media.

Felipe
Right. So that’s massive. It’s going to be completely different for everyone that’s using PostLab right now. Do you have any idea about when you’re planning on making that available for people?

Paul
Yeah, we’ve build the guts of it over the last one and a half years. We’re now going to build the interface. So we think we’ll be able to show something near IBC.

What this means is that a high-end media workflow specialist like Felipe will be able set up a team made of local editors or remote editors or local and remote editors and have them all work on events from the same Final Cut Pro library.

Each collaborator will be able to make changes to events they have read/write access to. Others will be able to read those events.

Editors can be assigned the events associated with a given episode of a series.

Assistant editors can update metadata of media in an event. Metadata such as rights clearances, transcripts associated with specific timecodes.

Other assistants can manage colour across the whole production using Colourlab plugins. Or prepare to handover timelines to audio professionals.

VFX editors will be able to take notes from producers and modify a timeline with new versions of VFX from vendors.

Good news for those in Final Cut Pro postproduction!