Custom keypad for video editing?

[kye]

I've gone down a rabbit hole with hardware controllers, and while I am really appreciating my Beatstep Davinci Resolve Edition for colour grading, it's not the tool for video editing.  

The tool for video editing in Resolve is the Davinci Resolve Keyboard, but I can't justify the $1000 price tag, and one of the reviews I read said that it's only worth the money over a normal keyboard if you use the extra buttons that it has on the sides.  Ultimately, the review said, you'll have more keyboard shortcuts than you will have keys on the keyboard, so the extra physical buttons are needed so that you're not constantly having to do Command - Shift - Something to get at your shortcuts.

This lead me to the idea of just buying more keys and then programming them to say Command - Shift - Something when I press a key.

That lead me to this article - https://www.instructables.com/id/Making-a-powerful-programmable-keypad-for-less-tha/

It talks about using one of these:

along with this software to program it:

http://www.hidmacros.eu/

This would mean that any function of any software that can have a keyboard shortcut attached to it can be assigned onto one of these and then you can have your own dedicated controller.

Has anyone done this?

These keypads are $10 from amazon and the software is free. I think it's worth doing just to try it out.

 

 

[BTM_Pix]

If you don't mind paying a bit more then you might want to look at something like the Delux T11.

This video shows it is a real world comparison in Resolve versus using keyboard shortcuts.

 

To be honest though, if you are looking to get a slice of the editing acceleration that the DaVinci edit controller gives you then I think you could do a lot worse than the  Contour ShuttlePro v2.

I think a lot of people have forgotten about it because its been out so long but it really does offer some good functionality.

You can combine it with one of the cheap programmable keyboards if you like too and also do the same with the cheaper Contour ShuttleXPress if you just want the jog/shuttle wheel and a few programmable buttons.

 

[kye]

Just doing some searching for something else and came upon this - does the keypad look familiar?

@BTM_Pix thanks, but wow are they more expensive!

It seems like the shuttle wheel is the only hardware control that can't be easily replicated with a keyboard, but do people use this much?

In Resolve the J-K-L combo is backwards-stop-forwards but if you hold down K and hit L then it goes forwards one frame and J goes back one frame, so it's easy to fine-tune the playhead frame-by-frame without moving your fingers at all.

I'm curious to hear what other people are using...

[BTM_Pix]

4 minutes ago, kye said:

thanks, but wow are they more expensive!

It seems like the shuttle wheel is the only hardware control that can't be easily replicated with a keyboard, but do people use this much?

Well compared to the BM controller they're not so its all relative 🙂

I use the jog/shuttle all the time (I even developed an interface to be able to use it with LumaFusion on the ipad) but I'm an old fart who grew up with that sort of interface from the tape days.

With the jog/shuttle and its surrounding keys mapped for play/pause, mark in/out, insert to timeline, previous/next edit point and zoom in/out, I find it really fast to cut with.

Its not just the mapping (as that can be done with anything) but its the way the keys are positioned around the jog/shuttle that makes it more intuitive and, as a consequence, faster for me personally.

[BTM_Pix]

You might want to look at one handed programmable keyboards designed for gamers too as they are relatively cheap (circa €25-35), have a lot more keys and have wrist wrests which makes them a bit more comfortable for long sessions.

Plus, garish RGB lights of course !

[kye]

2 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

Well compared to the BM controller they're not so its all relative 🙂

Yah, the $200 one might be 20x the little USB keypad, but it's also only 20% of the price of the Resolve Keyboard, so yes, everything is relative.

2 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

I use the jog/shuttle all the time (I even developed an interface to be able to use it with LumaFusion on the ipad) but I'm an old fart who grew up with that sort of interface from the tape days.

With the jog/shuttle and its surrounding keys mapped for play/pause, mark in/out, insert to timeline, previous/next edit point and zoom in/out, I find it really fast to cut with.

I've taken to using the layout:

I O P

J K L

where I is Mark In, O is Mark Out, and P is Append to Timeline, and J K L. are backwards, stop and forwards.  Then in the Cut panel I can pull up tape mode and it puts all the clips in a folder back-to-back (like tape, funnily enough!) and then just using these 6 to go through and do selects.  

I find that works just fine, and I get selects out of that onto a timeline.  Considering I mostly shoot my own travel and events I am normally keeping things in sequential order, and only change the order if there's a problem and I need a cut-away or something to fix the coherence, that means that the selects are also an Assembly.

The part that has me wondering is once I've got the Assembly it's what happens from there.

I then go through and work out what the shots are that I want to essentially shortlist.  I do this by dragging the good ones up onto a different track (often several different tracks for different classifications of shots) and this isn't something that I have used the keyboard for in the past, but would be cool.

Then I cull all the shots that weren't shortlisted, apply music, and then I'm doing more fine-tuning of the edit in accordance with the music.  

As my selects are typically the entire duration of the "good bits" from the source clips, they're normally way too long and so I'm mostly taking clips that are 2-20s long and cutting them down to the 1-5s to fit into the timing of the edit.  This is done with Command-Shift-[ and Command-Shift-] which do a ripple delete from the playhead either to the start of the clip ([) or the end of the clip (]).  

I'm likely using some other keys to navigate around too during this phase.  I should do a mini editing session and actually film the keyboard so I can see what I'm doing during a real edit, rather than editing but trying to pay attention to the keys I use rather than the actual edit.

2 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

You might want to look at one handed programmable keyboards designed for gamers too as they are relatively cheap (circa €25-35), have a lot more keys and have wrist wrests which makes them a bit more comfortable for long sessions.

Plus, garish RGB lights of course !

Luckily, the garish LED lights are extra if you can find the stripped down versions!

Depending on the keypad I might end up getting something that's got nicer ergos.  I might also just end up remapping more keys on the normal keyboard using the Keyboard Shortcut editor in Resolve 🙂 

[BTM_Pix]

5 hours ago, kye said:

Yah, the $200 one might be 20x the little USB keypad, but it's also only 20% of the price of the Resolve Keyboard, so yes, everything is relative.

$200 US or Australian ?

The Contour ShuttlePro v2 is only €90/$99US so it should be under $150 AUS, how much import duty are you paying over there 😉 

[kye]

14 minutes ago, BTM_Pix said:

$200 US or Australian ?

The Contour ShuttlePro v2 is only €90/$99US so it should be under $150 AUS, how much import duty are you paying over there 😉 

If I quote a $ then I've auto-translated for our mono-currency friends in the good 'ol USA.  

A bit like how they get to use the internet without a country code.

and don't get me started on the Australia tax.  I've known people who wanted to buy an expensive piece of equipment (approaching the cost of a cheap car) and instead of buy it locally they take the family on a week long shopping holiday through Asia and then pick up the piece of equipment on their way back through Singapore, just paying for it via extra luggage fees.......  and still come out ahead.

[BTM_Pix]

3 minutes ago, kye said:

If I quote a $ then I've auto-translated for our mono-currency friends in the good 'ol USA.  

I thought so, which is why I was surprised at the $200 figure as its less than 100 in the, erm, "World Series" style denomination.

4 minutes ago, kye said:

I've known people who wanted to buy an expensive piece of equipment (approaching the cost of a cheap car) and instead of buy it locally they take the family on a week long shopping holiday through Asia and then pick up the piece of equipment on their way back through Singapore, just paying for it via extra luggage fees.......  and still come out ahead.

There is absolutely no way that I will be doing do the same thing to buy a GFX100 in Tokyo for €3K less than it is in Madrid.

Absolutely no way at all.

Not until the immigration restrictions are lifted.

[kye]

Just looked for where I got that $200 and it was an amazon listing, but I've now found more and yeah, it's less than that!

[Geoff CB]

My desk setup.

Love hard buttons and jog/shuttle shuttle wheels for edit and the color wheels being physical. Just makes editing and grading more fun for me. 

For those considering I would AT LEAST get a jog wheel, so nice to go through the timeline with it and very hard when I'm on another computer without one. 

[kye]

3 hours ago, Geoff CB said:

My desk setup.

Love hard buttons and jog/shuttle shuttle wheels for edit and the color wheels being physical. Just makes editing and grading more fun for me. 

For those considering I would AT LEAST get a jog wheel, so nice to go through the timeline with it and very hard when I'm on another computer without one. 

Great looking setup!

I'm curious how much you use the colour part of the colour wheels in comparison to the levels (rings) of the wheels?

I have the Beatstep mod and it gives the levels for LGG as dials, which is awesome, and it occurs to me that I generally don't use the LGG colour controls that much, but I'm wondering if it's just that the convenience (or lack of it due to no 2d controllers) has prevented me from using them, or if it's something else.

I'm rarely called to adjust the colour of various luma ranges differently to others, so using temp/tint seems to work for me.

Of course, I'm still just getting used to the LGG levels and have only recently realised how good they are for grading footage - so much more powerful than I thought they'd be considering how simple they are.

[Geoff CB]

2 hours ago, kye said:

Great looking setup!

I'm curious how much you use the colour part of the colour wheels in comparison to the levels (rings) of the wheels?

I have the Beatstep mod and it gives the levels for LGG as dials, which is awesome, and it occurs to me that I generally don't use the LGG colour controls that much, but I'm wondering if it's just that the convenience (or lack of it due to no 2d controllers) has prevented me from using them, or if it's something else.

I'm rarely called to adjust the colour of various luma ranges differently to others, so using temp/tint seems to work for me.

Of course, I'm still just getting used to the LGG levels and have only recently realised how good they are for grading footage - so much more powerful than I thought they'd be considering how simple they are.

Use the color adjustments mainly for creative project.  For day to day editing what I use the most is hitting offset and I can adjust the white balance with the left wheel, tint with center wheel, and the exposure with the right. I use that adjustment constantly. 

Have the stream deck setup to create new color nodes and for switchin between editing/color/fairlight/deliver pages.  

[kye]

6 hours ago, Geoff CB said:

Use the color adjustments mainly for creative project.  For day to day editing what I use the most is hitting offset and I can adjust the white balance with the left wheel, tint with center wheel, and the exposure with the right. I use that adjustment constantly. 

Have the stream deck setup to create new color nodes and for switchin between editing/color/fairlight/deliver pages.  

Thanks.  

That's interesting that the LGG colour wheels are more of a 'look' tool rather than a 'correction' tool if that makes sense.

I seem to have become allergic to the orange/teal grade and have no desire to use it on my projects, and I think of all the grades that do a tint-vs-luma style adjustment that the O/T grade is probably the most natural, so I think I'm even less likely to grade using any other colour combination.  

I'm still working out what looks I like, but I'm making steady progress.  I discovered DCTL over the weekend and that's a fascinating thing.  I suspect that with that ability I may end up developing a DCTL for any adjustments I want to do that Resolve doesn't have an easy out-of-the-box solution for and then probably just grade under my custom one of those.

[kye]

WINNING!

TLDR; The combo of a eBay keypad and the USB Overdrive utility (for Mac) is a winner with Resolve, and likely other NLEs too.

Longer version....

My portable editing setup now includes the BM Speed Editor, the Beatstep controller and Beatstep Resolve Edition software, and now this little custom keypad.

The keypad and USBOverdrive allows macros, so you hit one key and it sends the computer a string of keyboard commands.  In combination with the keyboard shortcuts in your NLE, you can make it do pretty cool stuff.

In the Cut page, the Speed Editor works in a certain way which creates limitations, and Resolve has a few bugs (in my version at least) that also limit things.

I have set keys that highlight the current clip, trim start/end to playhead, then unselect all clips.  Or similar but splitting the clip.  Or similar but ripple deleting the clip.  These are mostly workarounds to the peculiarities of Resolve and the Cut page and Speed Editor, but I think it's an excellent addition to using it.  

I can navigate using the wheel on the Speed Editor, hit a key and trigger a macro, and then fine-tune on the Speed Editor if further refinement is required, and then keep going.  I had some, let's say, distracting, workarounds that I had to do in order to perform these functions involving not only having to take my hands off the controller, but also triggering my frustration with BM at not building things in more flexible ways, which really took me out of the zone!