I have a love/hate relationship with post work. It's where all the magic of the final product comes together, but it can be oh so mundane and tedious. One editor is making it both more fun and more efficient by trading in his mouse and keyboard for something a bit more interesting: a video game controller.
If you think about it, at its core, a good editing plan has two aspects: control and efficiency. And really, video game controllers are built for just that. They're ergonomic, with all their buttons and joysticks within easy reach, they're designed to have a multitude of controls that enable different functions, and they're often highly customizable.
In the video above, Casey Faris walks us through how he set up and uses a $25 Logitech controller to edit. It's a particularly clever setup; Faris evades the issue of having fewer buttons than a keyboard by using certain trigger keys that instantly remap the controller on the fly, allowing him to have a completely different set of functions depending on the context. I'm always looking for new ways to speed up my editing process and to make it more interesting, and this seems like a particularly great solution to both those conundrums.
Pretty cool. I've been considering getting a steam controller for light room & photoshop. Seeing how highly customizable the controls are for gaming i imagine you can do alot in programs. Waiting on some more user experiences before i dive in though
One of the biggest downsides to customizing software interface is that you teach yourself habits that may not always work. This is something that happened to me. I used to use Xkeys for my work station, and loved them. But then I found myself having to work away from my own station... and it was like starting over. I had no idea how to use shortcuts any more, or where to find tools, or to make adjustments to those tools.
Once I threw out my customized hardware, it freed me up to edit more on location (and really has changed the way I work) and has forced me to become proficient in the editing program in a way I initially resisted. It may not be everyone's story, but you should know that hardware that does steps for you can also make you absolutely reliant on it to do those steps.
I managed to make a Lua script that works with a character mapper to use an XBOX controller with the Blackmagic ATEM switchers. Not sure if there's any live video geeks out there that are interested in that, but it certainly made a switcher that doesn't come with an interface quite reasonable to use for regular camera switching.