Hedge expands options by acquiring Postlab

Postlab is now a part of Hedge, and an interesting one at that

In a potentially interesting marriage of coding skills, backup specialist Hedge has acquired collaborative software developer Postlab.

One of the smaller items of M&A action to come out of NAB this year could still lead to some of the coolest tools a little bit further down the line; well-regarded software developer Hedge, which specialises in making backup software for filmmakers, has acquired fellow developer Postlab.

Postlab is interesting and part of the burgeoning movement to making collaborative software for distributed teams. Two years old, it was a side project spun off from a Dutch evangelical public broadcaster and effectively allows editors to collaborate on Final Cut Pro X projects. This includes version control, file sharing and commenting.

It’s open source and free, partly because it requires you to run your own infrastructure, and will remain that way, only now it’s going to be joined by a new forthcoming product, Postlab Cloud. This will naturally run on FCP X, but rather crucially won’t be limited by it.

“We're currently focusing on deeper Frame.io integration, support for other NLEs, and a proxy workflow,” comments Felipe Baez, one of the two Postlab developers (the other is Jasper Siegers) that are joining Hedge as a result of the acquisition.

Postlab Cloud has been built over the past couple of months and goes live as a concierge service at the end of April. Then it will start taking on FCPX teams of 5+ users, before a planned expansion and “opening the doors for everyone” later this year.

"While backups are a logical starting point, it has never been our intention to stick just to backup software,” says Paul Matthijs, Hedge CEO. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this further down the line.