The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP009: Room Design Strategies Part 2

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

Continuing our discussion on suite design, in this installment of The Offset Podcast Joey & Robbie get into more detail about gear you might want to consider having in a color/postproduction suite including: input devices, control surfaces, Streamdecks, foot pedals, aux monitors, 3D printing your own stuff, the amazing usefulness of VHB tape and a whole lot more!  Looking for a deep dive on reference & client monitors?  We'll cover that deep topic in a future episode.  

Hey there. In this installment of the Offset Podcast, we're picking up where we left off last time talking about room setup and equipment that you might want to consider. Stay tuned. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. Hey guys, welcome back to another installment of the Offset podcast. I'm Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna. Joey, this installment, I want to kind of pick up where we left off last time.

And for those viewers who might not have checked out that episode, we discussed sort of the validity of having an equipment in a machine room versus in room. And we talked about some general room considerations, including some, you know, some setup concerns or, you know, some setup ideas for how you're, might want to position your desk relative to the client and so on. We talked a little bit about getting things from the machine room, you know, into the, into your suite, you know, cable-wise, etc. But today, I want to take a look at sort of what's on our desk, you know, the things that

we need to have in the suite to be fast and functional. And there's a lot, you know, there's a reason why, you know, clients, when they come into the room, they kind of joke about, oh, I'm on the Starship Enterprise or something like that, you know, because it's like, we do. have a lot of input devices between control surfaces and tablets and stream decks and obviously monitors of every shape and variety. So I don't want to, you know, talk about a million pieces of equipment, but I want to talk about some of sort of the key sort of equipment categories, if you will, and some of the gear that we're using. So let's start off with talking about

some basic input devices, right? Everybody has always known that to mean the mouse, but I know, having known you for a long time, I know that you are very anti-mouse, you proudly claim to whoever will listen to you that you've not used a mouse in 20 years, and when you're forced to use one, you kind of have a mild panic attack. So tell us a little bit about input devices,

what you're using, and pros and cons that. It's true. I despise mice. The mouse is the worst input device ever, made for directing a pointer on a screen. It is inaccurate, slow, uncomfortable, painful to use, takes up way more space than it should because you're moving it all around. It's horrible. And I'm not being hyperbolic when I say this. If you go into my office, I have three computers, my main workstation, assist station, and a kind of secondary system that I use for conform.

and online work and stuff like that, there is not a mouse anywhere. Okay, so with your anti-mouse attitude, what is the alternative for you? Well, that's the important thing, right? Because I can't just control the computer with telepathy. And not yet. I use two main things.

For very most general computing pointing, I use a Kinsington Trackball, which is a big kind of grading panel size. trackball. The reason why I've always loved track balls as opposed to mice is because muscle memory. Track ball's always in the same place. You know, you never need to look at it. Whereas a mouse, you're moving it around the table. It's always in a different place than where you left it. The track ball, I can just kind of grab and turn around and use without ever having to look at it. It's also much, much, much easier on your wrist because you're not doing as much kind of,

I guess, repetitive motion with it. But the primary device I use, if I had to just pick one input device forever, is a digitizer tablet. And those have come in all shapes and sizes and forms for a very long time. They started as tools for CAD. That's why they were called digitizer tablets, right? You would put a piece of paper under it and then trace it with the pin, essentially digitizing a two-dimensional image. So I, for many, many years, used the Waycom branded tablets because they were kind of the only name in the game in terms of pen tablets for computers.

More recently, some of their patents have expired and kind of the competitive world has brought in options that are super high quality. And I've moved all over to Zinslab brand tablets. But they're all, no matter what kind of tablet you use, they're all kind of the same general operating principle. The pen is wireless. It is powered by. emissions from the tablet, and you hover the pen above the tablet surface, and as you move it around, it does what's called an absolute positioning. So if I pick up the pen and hover it over the top left of the tablet, my mouse cursor goes to the top left of the screen. If I pick up the pen, move it somewhere else, hover it above a different spot on the tablet. My cursor goes to that

spot. If I pick it up and hover above that exact same spot where I started before in the top left, my pointer will be at the exact same spot. To click, you press down the pen. This is where people usually lose their mind. They buy the tablet and they start trying to just drag all across it, not realizing that now they're clicking and dragging everywhere on their screen. You hover the pen and then you press down to click and then there's auxiliary buttons on the top that you can use your index finger or your thumb

depending on how you hold the pen to access things like right-click, middle-click, or any other macros that you use. Now, this is really, really, really disconcerting if you've never used one before. The first time you do this hover positioning thing where it's absolute, not relative, where a mouse, you move it to the side, the cursor moves. You pick up the mouse, move it to another place, move it to the side again, cursor just moves more, right? It's relative positioning. No matter where you put the mouse on the desk, it doesn't matter.

With the pin tablet, you put that pin down, it goes exactly where you put it. And that's a beautiful thing once you get used to it because you know, okay, the buttons I use the most in the UI, I can feel exactly where they are on the pen. And it's just instantaneous. It's never dragging something to, you're not bringing the cursor slowly to a UI element. You're just taking your pen, dropping it exactly where you want it on the screen, and it's instantaneous. Yeah, I mean, so like, listen, I am a convert to the pen tablet thing, you know, probably not as long as you, but, you know, six, seven, years ago, whatever, I had prior to that, I had been on the search for kind of the perfect ergonomic mouse. And to be fair, there are a lot of good, I know that you hate them, but there are

a lot of good mice these days, you know, you can shake your head at me, it's fine. There's a lot of good trash cans at Home Depot. They all just hold trash. I was a big fan of the Logitech MX Master series, very ergonomic, lots of buttons, you know, without having to move your arm or your wrist, you could scroll left and right, scroll up and down. Obviously, a variety of picks. The MX Masters even had touch gestures on the mice, and I know what you probably think about that, but whatever, there are some good mice.

For me, the big reason that I ended up switching to a tablet was less to do with, you know, absolute positioning versus relative or this part of the screen or that part of the screen. It had to do with the fact that no matter what I did, I was developing carpal tunnel in my right hand, my dominant hand, right? and I tried you know I tried those those fancy vertical

mice you know that you know more you hold it more like a like a pistol grip kind of thing I tried the Logitech big ball that always just felt maybe I have short thumbs or something

that just felt like I was doing more ligament damage to my thumb trying to move that around and so I switched over to the pen you know Waycoms at the time and it did take a while I felt like I was slower

almost like hesitant to click on things because I was afraid that I was gonna like click and drag something somewhere. But, you know, after a week or so, like, I can't imagine not using my pen now on anything. It's just the ergonomics of it are just great. And it's worth mentioning that, you know, a lot of these tablets, whether it's Wakeham or Zin Labs or whatever, they're going to have, you know, different sizes, which you can match up to your desk and or your on-screen real estate. One mistake I see a lot of people doing is they have, you know,

really small tablets, but really high resolution. screens, right? And that can make it a little awkward. My general opinion on this is, you know, try to, if you have a large, high resolution screen, try to get the one that's, you know, the biggest, most comfortable. I've never personally owned the real big, large ones, you know, but the medium size generally for most of these companies seems to do the fit for me. Right now, I'm actually on a small one because it's my, you know, my little cyst station here at home. I think it's great. I love them. I constantly wonder, and I want to get your opinion on this, because while we're on the subject, what's your opinion about the computer screen tablets versus the digitizer tablets?

I'm thinking of like, you know, the Sintique and that kind of style. Yeah. So before I get deep into the on-screen tablets, I just want to mention one or two more things. Because again, I'm a tablet freak. I love these things. Robbie's absolutely right about the screen size to tablet relationship. If you have multiple monitors, you might want to get the larger tablet because one thing, that all of these tablets have in common is there's a preference in their options that says

force to screen aspect ratio. This is really important, basically, because the positioning is absolute, like I said. So if you have a square aspect ratio tablet and two big widescreen monitors, your X-axis on the tablet is going to move 10 times as fast as your Y-axis, and it's going to be confusing and it's going to be terrible and you're going to hate it. So what you do essentially is you map the tablet, you turn off half the tablet to make get the right aspect ratio for your screen raster, and now if you draw a circle on the tablet, it'll be a circle on the screen. But if you know you have lots of big widescreen monitors,

you might want to consider a bigger tablet. Now, me, I've been using these things for so long that even on pretty big monitor setups, I use the small tablet because it's super fast, because it's smaller. But I am 20 years into this really, really precise. It's definitely a learning curve and when you're learning the tablet, my biggest recommendation is throw your mouse in the trash. You don't have to actually throw it in the trash, but unplug it, remove all other pointing devices, and struggle through because it is awkward and weird when you first start it, and eventually it will just click and feel natural. And the problem is if you don't unplug your other pointing devices, when it starts to get hard, you'll default to go to the other pointing device. You'll never

have that moment. One thing that I really helped my transition years ago and I still do it and I don't know if anybody else does about me, but that is, you know, we'll have to do a whole other episode talking about our love of VHB tape products. I don't know if anybody out there uses VHB, but Joey and I, Joey turned me on again to VHB and now I use it for pretty much everything in my life, but it's an ultra sticky but yet removable double-sided tape. And one of the things that was screwing me up at first with the tape. tablets was I found that I was kind of, you know, just the way I was using it. I was kind of pushing the tablet itself around the desk, which was driving me absolutely bonkers. So the

best thing I ever did in my transition was just took two, yeah, just took two strips of VHB on the back of it, put it on the desk. And then that way, it's kind of almost like, it feels like you're just using the desk as kind of as the pad. Yep, quick plug for VHB, 3M, very high bond, double-sided tape. Literally my entire suite is held together by it. I have cars with parts held together by it. Uh, don't tell the Maryland Department of Transportation that. But it is super useful to have like a good, clean, double-sided tape to put some of these devices arranged in your desk in such a way that they're not going to flop around. And mine even is kind of at, it's not like straight onto the desk, right?

It's even at a little bit of an angle just where my hand kind of falls. Yeah, where you feel naturally with it. Yeah. So that, that brings us to these. display tablets. Waycom has always had them. They called it their Centique product line. My friends at Zense Labs just released a really impressive, I think, 20-some inch, pretty

color-accurate display tablet that I've heard nothing but good things about. Those are really, really attractive tools for artists that are painting, in my opinion. Or working on photos directly, because you've got your image in front of you and you're

working on it just like if you were drawing on a piece of paper. Yep. I feel like they lose a utility for applications and systems that were not designed to work on top of a screen. The reason I say that is every time I've used one, I'm like, this is going to be awesome. I'm going to have my clips right under my fingertip. It's going to feel super interactive. It's going to be like minority report.

You know, I'm going to be moving things around. It's going to be awesome. And then you actually use it and you realize that your arm's covering two-thirds of the user interface and it's confusing. and you're moving your arm around and accidentally doing weird stuff and no matter how good the touch rejection is, it's not exactly right,

and you don't know where to position your elbow, and it's just, they're fantastic tools for digital artists that draw and paint and retouched photos. I haven't seen a good use for it in normal post-production, and I think that's just a function of the fact that all of our software was not designed

for that kind of human universe. It's not like, you know, I've, a couple times I've tried, it. I've like, you know, because I, you know me, I'm really into the touch interface on iPads, right? I love how natural and fluid that is. It's just not the same, unfortunately. And I find, like, you know, even with the hand, you know, the finger or hand rejection or whatever, you still end up, you know, bumping buttons on the screen or, you know, doing various things. And to you honest, they're kind of pricey and kind of big. They take up quite a bit of

screen real estate because they have stands that kind of, you know, you can adjust the angle. You've got to adjust it to your position for where you're doing it. So we may have to show about tablets because we love them so much, but let's move on to some other devices. And I think the most obvious one in a color suite, obviously, is going to be the color control surface, right? You have to have been hiding under a rock if you don't understand the basic benefits of a control surface, right? It allows you to have tactile control over simultaneous parameters of the software that you're using. Of course, if you're using Resolve like we do, Black Magic has a dedicated line of panels going from the micro all the way up to the full size of advanced panel. And basically, as you work your way up, no matter if it's Black Magic, a tangent, or even, you know, on, say, baselight or Nocoda or whatever, as you work your way up, the model lines for most of these manufacturers for color control surfaces, essentially what you're getting is, generally speaking, more buttons, right, to do more things, more screen.

to see more information simultaneously on the screen. And then depending on the control surface itself, there might be some proprietary that panel only things. Black Magic has done this, of course, with kind of separating the advanced panel line from the micro and the mini panels. There's lots of things on the advanced panel that can't be mapped anywhere else,

except inside of, or with rather the advanced panel. And that's proprietary. You know, Black Magic doesn't let something of those things happen elsewhere. And I think, you know, from my perspective, I can't imagine being a professional colorist without a control service. I talked a lot of people, some very, you know, I've even heard of, you know, A-list colorist back in the day, especially with tools like Luster and some of the older other color

correction services, Apple Grations or rather, were, you know, they shun control surfaces. Everything was pen-driven and that kind of stuff. you might have some comfortability with that coming from your you know your ds and soft imaged days back back then but these days i can't i can't think of anything more you know just kind of required in a room i can deal without this that and the other thing but without the control surface i'm just slow i honestly the muscle memory is so built up over the years that i'm just considerably faster But also, I think the thing, again, is I'm doing multiple things at once, right? You know, if I want to be able to, you know, drop the shadow contrast while simultaneously, you know, adding some warmth to the highlights, yeah, I can do those things simultaneously.

And I think the other thing about a control surface that really is a key thing for me is that, you know, as you go up the chain, you're not necessarily going to get... I don't know, I should say, you're not going to necessarily get different results, but what I find is that you're going to get faster results. You know, people often ask me like, man, how do you get through, you know, whatever, 600 shots in a day or something like that? And honestly, it's because of the control surface, you know? Yeah. I've used all of them.

They all have pros and cons, I think. I certainly, you know, obviously there's a lot of people who lusts after the big panel. It's not, it's amazing, but it's not, you know, There's some downsides of it. Downsides of the mini, downside of the micro. But I know that, you know, there's other people out there using just besides,

you know, just other tools other than resolve. There are other panels that work in other applications, right? Yeah. I think if you're in resolve and resolves your primary software, you'd be silly to buy a third party panel. The black magic panels are so directly integrated with the software that nothing works better.

I use the mini panel here at home, but I've used all of them. the advance panel if you have room for it on your desk is absolutely incredible. And I'll say this, Black Magic recently updated the layout of it, given a completely new layout, and it's just so much better than it ever was before because remember that panel's been out for a long time. And the software has obviously evolved hugely over 10 some years. Now the logic and the layout and the functionality on the advanced panel matches the software. They actually gave new keycaps. So you had to go in and replace all the keycaps.

And now if you buy an advanced panel, they're all shipping with the new keycaps. They're not shipping the old layout at all. So if you have an advanced panel and you haven't moved the new keycaps, I highly recommend doing it. Just like when you get your first Waycom tablet, that first week you're going to hate it because you're relearning everything. But once it clicks, it's so good. Now, if you are working in other software or you need to do multiple different softwares,

really the name of the game is tangent, the tangent elements. So a cool new development is the tangent mapper software. Now, the tangent mapping and resolve hasn't been updated in many, many, many, many years, and you can't change it. It's really the only software that isn't mappable in the tangent mapper, which is their kind of version 2 of their driver software. You know, the mapper software that comes with the tangent panels is very, very powerful. you can map the different functionalities

of different software to anywhere you want in the panel. All of the buttons, every individual button and knob and rotary is not labeled so they have little screens telling you what they are so you can make the panel layout anything you want. I personally, on my second desk, have a full set of element panels, and that serves two purposes.

One, I'm hyper paranoid about failure. If I spill coffee into my mini panel, I want to have something as a backup. Right. But two, I do a lot of still photography, and my weapon of choice for photo retouching and photocolor grading is Capture 1. Capture 1 is fully mappable on the tangent panels and it works really, really, really well. Yeah, I mean, you know, the thing to me about control panels in general is that there are, like I said,

there's things you like and things that you can dislike about them. Yeah, I love the mini panel. I think it's so well built, it's so nice. and smooth and it's got exactly the right amount of stuff. We'll talk a little bit later about adding to the parts that it doesn't have. Yeah, we're going to talk about stream decks. I want to add one last quick thing to the mini panel, full panel discussion. That was actually seems like the smallest, stupidest thing, but is actually really kind of an awesome thing.

So the advanced panel is USB-based, right? Yes. which is weird but good because it was an upgrade from the older 2K panels that were all Ethernet-based which people had a problem with and they went to USB, it's great. Kind of can be a pain with the whole thing we were talking about last time with having stuff in a machine, you know, computers in a machine room and extending USB, but there's ways around that. The thing I love about the Mini is that it's POE powered over Ethernet, right? And because it's Ethernet network-based, it can actually work on multiple.

multiple computers from the same panel, right? And you're like, well, why would I ever want to use that? Well, I'll give you an example, right? I am rendering something on my main box, right? And I want to get ahead on, you know, whatever, doing some base grades on another show, right? Well, guess what? I can just flip my monitor over to input two, which is the output of my assist station. And because the panel's there, and because it's IP base, I can switch things over, use that,

and still use the panel while my other box is doing something. It has some advantages of being able to power cycle the panel easily. And it's just one less cable to have attached to the panel. Yeah, it's real nice to just have that one little Ethernet cable and keep all your wire management really nice and clean. So let's talk about Stream Deck, as you suggested, because one of the things that we're losing when we go to a smaller control surface is a lot of button functionality. There's just not as physically as many buttons somaptu, right? And the stream deck, I think over the past, I don't know how long it's been out, probably five, six, seven years has that the product itself and the ecosystem has exploded, right? This was originally kind of marketed towards gamers, content creators doing like Twitch streaming, you know, or streaming live games or, you know, using OBS to do, you know, various things.

And it still absolutely can be used for that. Also, it's just exploded how many uses it has and the ecosystem it has. In my opinion, the stream deck, whether, you know, now it's available in a couple different sizes from like the micro, which I think is, well, like two or three buttons, all the way up to the excels, which I don't have a couple of them here, I think, are 25 buttons or something like that, right? The whole idea about this is that it is an LCD back lane that has a bunch of buttons on top of it, you know, kind of segmenting that out, you know, the big LCD, and you can have

buttons that do different things. And by different things, I mean different things. I mean, they can be keyboard shortcuts. They can run various macros. Those macros can be designed inside of the stream deck software to do multiple actions or multiple button pushes or whatever. Or they can be designed outside of the stream deck ecosystem. Trigger an external application. Through an external application to write a script to like, hey, when I click this button, I want these not. nine things to happen, right? Move the mouse here, click this, click that, right? So, you know, on the surface, the stream deck provides a lot of missing functionality that you might not have with a smaller panel, but even, I got to be honest with you, Joey, even with the big panels, I still ran a stream

deck, right? For a lot of things. For example, we're big fans of Omniscope, scope software. You can actually just map some, you know, solo commands or different layouts and all that kind of stuff right to the stream deck. So, you know, if you're doing QC, one button just to hit QC, right? Also, companies like Flanders Scientific, they have their, their IP-based control utility. You can map monitor controls. Like, if you have a big monitor up on the wall, instead of getting up and hit the menu button and twist the knobs, you can control all that using a stream deck. I know that you even use stream deck for, like, home automation and, like, switching between, like, turning your air conditioning on and off and, you know, that, this kind of thing. You are the

stream deck expert. So I want to hear. from you what it is that you think it provides other than what I just said. And also, if you could just give us a kind of a brief 50,000 foot level view of, okay, I got shortcuts, I can do some basic stuff with the stream deck, but now I want to do something real complex. Mouse move, click here, move there. Like, what does the rest of the ecosystem look like for doing those things on a Mac or PC? Yeah, definitely. I like to, not to be too arrogant and egotistical about this. I like to, I like to to say that I was the one that brought the stream deck to the post-production world. They were pretty niche little devices.

Again, like you said, in the gaming world, most of the gaming people looked at them and said, why would you spend this much money on just some buttons? And I looked at it and said, oh my God, those buttons are only that much money. This is the greatest thing ever. I'll take five. And I've been advocating for the stream deck since, like, day one. And it has just exploded in our industry. I like to take a little bit of credit for that.

I was like the original stream deck for post-production advocate. And the reason I think they're so powerful and the reason they're so useful, we've used macro keyboards forever. Before the stream deck, we used X keys. They were programmable keyboards, and you could print out little inserts

and put their functionality in there. The biggest problem with those kinds of setting up macro layouts, whether it's on a mouse that has macro buttons or a set. separate macro keyboard that you need to arrange and then label, is they're not dynamic? And what I mean by that is you can't really experiment, right? You sit down and you think about it, okay, I want printer lights over here, and I want

track forward and track back over here, and I'm going to build my little panel, and I'm going to put it together, I'm going to print out all the labels and write them down and put them on the little thing, and it's great. And you plug it in, you're like, this is awesome. I've got all these new buttons. And then after you work with it for like a week, you're like, eh, I kind of wish I had arranged it completely different. Even more so than that, you're essentially, besides the flexibility of your preference of how you want to arrange things, you're essentially limited to a top level only with that, right?

Exactly. Whatever buttons you have on that top level, those are what the buttons are. Or shifting them and trying to remember it or trying to make really complicated labels. So the stream deck, you can have hundreds of different combinations. All of them don't have to be labeled because the screens label them dynamically as you page through them or go through submenus. and most importantly, you can evolve your layout in real time. You want to switch two buttons, drag one across to the other, and it just switches. The icon changes, the labeling changes, and the functionality moves with it.

It lets you build a panel in an interactive way that you never could before, and you can just kind of, it's like anything else. The more you can iterate and evolve, the better it's going to be. And this lets you do that in a very non-destructive way. Yeah, those are some great points about the stream deck. I think the point that I think holds the most confusion for people is, okay, mapping keyboard shortcuts and that kind of basic thing makes sense, right? One thing that I should point out before I get into what I'm about to say is that in the stream deck ecosystem, there is a marketplace too. So a lot of people have done not only preconfigured icon packs and things like that, but also preconfigured actions, right?

So somebody has some, you know, someone has spent the time, you know, going through and built that functionality. So if you want to buy something that's turnkey, right? Generally speaking, all you have to do is load their keyboard profile into resolve logic wherever you're using and then map those keys, right? The fun stuff really comes, though, when you want to kind of DIY it and kind of get a little more functionality of that, right? So the two main applications that we have experience with, and I always recognize

commend the people are on the Mac. It's an application called Keyboard Maestro, which I think is like 30 bucks, something like that, 30 or 40 bucks. And then on the PC, a good equivalent would be an app called Auto Hotkey, right? And they allow for similar functionality. However, I have to say, and this is not a Mac PC argument, I would just say from a usability standpoint, keyboard Maestro is just a lot more user-friendly than Auto Hotkey, right? But it allows you to do things like, multiple step button clicks, right? Or it lets you do things like what happens on push and release, right? But more so to the point, it also lets you do a lot of things with mouse positioning and things that are on screen. So here's a great example, right? You're on a mini panel,

and you work a lot in groups, right? So preclip, clip, post clip, and timeline level groups. In Resolve, that's either a pulldown, right, or it's a bunch of little small radio buttons at the top of the node graph, right? One of the things you can do is write a script, a macro or whatever, that says, okay, push them, you know, move the mouse position to here and then click. When you're done clicking, move it to the next one or so on, right? And the complexity of that is up to you, but I want to say that if it sounds like I'm advocating, like, actual coding, it can be like that.

uncertain tools like auto hockey, for example, but it doesn't have to be, right? A lot of these tools now have built-in functionality for mouse movement, various clickings, like that kind of thing. You've done a lot more sophisticated things like this by using like variables to remember mouse positions and stuff like that. But the point is that the sky is kind of the limit, right, in terms of how deep you want to get, how many levels down you want one action, how many, you know, one action, how many additional actions that triggers.

I'm trying to think of a really complicated one that I know that you've designed. Nothing's coming to mind that is easily explainable. Do you have something like that you feel like is like, you know, a really complicated one outside of not being able to use those tools? Yeah, and there's two things that I really, really use keyboard maestro for with the stream deck and resolve, and that is node selection. And, well, before they added mini panel support for Dolby Vision, Dalby Vision trims.

So I actually made a whole Stream Deck Excel, submenu that did all the Dolby Vision trims, both up and down with the little buttons to go plus and minus on every trim. And I even went so far as to have two different versions of the macros, a fast and a slow, and a stream deck button to select between them.

So I could go coarse and then go make big changes to my Dolby Vision trims, then I could click fine on the stream deck and it would switch over to all the other macros and make very fine adjustments. And then hit one button to back out and go back to my main stream deck layout. That's kind of that dynamic layout that I was

so tied to with the stream deck is you can have submenus. You can go, okay, Dolby Vision, whole new UI built right there. Now, for node selection, as you mentioned, there's a great feature on the advanced panel. You can just type in a node number and hit select, and it highlights that node. If you use a fixed node structure, like you should be. That's a whole different podcast episode that we'll get to. But if you use a fixed node structure, this is basically worth the price of the advanced panel just for that one thing.

Right? Because you know, okay, I've got a particular setting on node 13. You always know it's always on 13. 13 select, done. You never need to click your mouse. It's super fast. My way around that with the stream deck has been, I actually bought another stream deck XL. I have one dedicated only to node selection.

I saved a preset layout in Resolve that I always load up when I'm grading. So my node tree and my preset node structure is always in the same place. and I have stream deck buttons literally laid out in the same shape as my node tree so I can literally just reach out and press a node physically on the stream deck keyboard maestro picks up that stream deck button

clicks on the node for me and we're done I can't imagine working without that and actually clicking on individual nodes or going previous and next node a whole bunch of times to select them I can't imagine my life without that and it's a $200 button panel and a cheap piece of software

allows me to do it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I dig it. You know, so there's a lot of functionality like that with with the stream decks. And again, one of the things that's not a stream deck specific thing, but Black Magic improved our lights greatly is that they actually went on the Mac, they went to a standardized Mac menu structure now that works, that works great because one of the things you can do in keyboard maestro, for example, is you can actually search in menus now with keyboard maestro. So instead of having to design, you know, some sort of hand gymnastic keyboard shortcut to just map to a particular function, you can just say, hey, okay, I don't have any idea what the keyboard shortcut is for that,

but just go into this menu. Window menu, show power window outline. Exactly. Right. And in one step, you're done. But if you want to go even more advanced like that, there's a lot of tools like, hey, find this icon on the interface, right? For example, one thing I want to add to Streamdex, and we can, I think we have two or three

more things to talk about, but I want to say one more thing about Streamdex. And this is a weird one. But I remember the day specifically when you, it was like 9.30 in the morning, I got a slack from you. Like, oh my God, oh my God, they came out with a foot pedal. And I was like, okay. And so Elgato has now a stream deck foot pedal. It's a three button USB based foot pedal. Kind of looks like maybe like a footrest that you would have under your desk, right?

But it works in the whole ecosystem. and you can sign things to the buttons on the stream deck, on the stream deck foot pedal. For example, the one that I have, I have a couple different layouts for it, but most basic, it's, you know, go forward, go backwards, stop, or, you know, kind of mimic transport controls.

I have another layout for it that does things like, you know, grab still, play still, previous still, you know, so I can navigate with that. It's a weird thing, right? But we have more than just these two hands, right? Like, you know, when pilots are flying a plane, they're not just using the yoke, right? They're using pedals and the whole nine yards of floodplain.

I know I was first exposed to this like 25 years ago by using a foot pedal, right? And at the time, there were these big kind of archaic maybe PS2 or whatever that connection was called or cereal or something like that. And I was first exposed to it. I think I was first exposed to it in the discrete logic days, I think, is when I was. But it might have been another system. Maybe it was a quantel or something like that. I have bought into the foot pedal scenario hardcore, man. Not just the stream deck one, but I'm a guitarist.

And so, you know, pedal boards have always been a big thing for me, you know, clicking on and off pedals and now with MIDI controllers and stuff. I actually have used a number of them over the years. I would encourage people to also take a look at the Airturn products. These are wireless Bluetooth-based pedal controllers. You know, again, two to, I think, eight buttons or six buttons is the biggest one. but you can map different functionality to that. I also have started to use guitar-based MIDI controllers.

The company I prefer is a company called Morning Star, because keyboard my show supports MIDI commands now. Right? So I can fire off things that are MIDI-based within logic and other places, you know, on the Fairlight page or whatever, to control things. And so foot pedals are something, I know, people are going to think you're like weird, you know, doing things with buttons and foot pedals.

but I would encourage people to think about it because it does offer a lot of additional functionality with your feet that are just sitting on the ground. Yeah, I was kind of surprised at how much I really like the foot pedals, but I do because it keeps your hands free to do other things color-wise. We've talked a lot about using different things at the same time, which is a real advantage of color panel. Well, the foot pedals give you another dimension to that.

And with the stream deck ones in specific, they're really nice because I can call up different functionality for them on my other stream deck. So I can pull up, oh, I've got one for playheads. I've got one for stills. I've got ones for navigating the timeline. I don't need to remember

what the foot pedals are doing at any given time. I just press a button on my stream deck to call up a foot pedal layout and they're there. And anything that I've already programmed in keyboard maestro or any of the other things I have set up in the stream deck,

anything I can trigger with a stream deck. I can trigger with the stream deck. the foot pedals and vice versa. So it's it works really well in their ecosystem. Yeah. And I mean, it's one of those things where like you don't realize like how much it adds to what you're doing until you actually, like it seems silly on the surface of it to spend, you know, harder in money, you know, several hundred dollars on a on a foot pedal. But man, I tell you, once you go to that way out, it's, it's kind of addictive. All right. Last thing I want to kind of wrap up with, two last things we'll wrap up with. You know, we're not going to talk about

reference monitors here, of course. But I, I do want to just kind of hint at a little bit about utility monitors, GUI monitors, and so on and so forth. Of course, when it comes to UI monitors or GUI monitors, the choice is totally yours about which way you go. Two schools of thought here, I think primarily. I don't care because I'm not looking at the UI, so who cares about what it is? It just needs to be high enough resolution because I'm going to turn down the brightness and all that kind of stuff altogether, right? Another school of thought for a lot of people who are using their monitors for maybe doing, you know, photo editing too or whatever. You know, just like any other monitor you want to consider getting a high quality, you know, if that's your need.

Higher quality, you know, better color debt, you know, bit depth, better color reproduction, etc. But while the monitors that interest me the most, Joey, are the ancillary additional monitors that we can use around the suite and on the desk for other things. And I see one in front of you, right in front of you behind your controlled surface there. it seems like it's a smaller monitor than the rest of your monitors. What's that one all about? Yeah, so we've gone through various levels of smaller HDMI monitors. I use, it's kind of called Elico where you can buy little cheapy HDMI monitors on Amazon for like 100 bucks,

and they're like 12 inch HTML capable monitors that work really, really well for scopes, video conferencing, anything like that. I've got two on my desk in front of me. One is actually watching my little security cameras I have around the house, and the other one is watching my ATEM, which I use for controlling Zoom meetings and stuff like that. I used to use them for scopes, but then I wanted something a little bit bigger.

And that's where I got this guy, which is a, this is a strange one, but I really, really love it. It is a 20-inch, 21-9 ultra-wide monitor. It's the smallest ultra-wide I've ever seen. So vertically, it's really, really small. Then I've got it angled back. So it fits under my reference monitor. And this is what I run my scopes on.

So my direct eye line is reference monitor, scopes right under it. And I love having that extra size to have the scope layout that I want, but still being able to, you know, see my reference monitor. And since it's connected to my assist station, if I'm not doing something with scopes, it's big enough. I can drag over like a word dot. with client notes or like a script or another window or something like that.

Or if you're doing like a, you know, like a live stream with a client, you can bring over like the video window with the client and be like, look, you know, keep your line of sight right to the monitor down to them. Yeah, anything on my assist station Mac, I can drag right over to that thing and it's really convenient. So I've bought into this too because I, as I've gotten older and let's just say achier with my body, you know, turning my head all the time to look at things is is not great, right? leads to neck pain, shoulder pain, et cetera. So I did this actually the same thing. And I know you experienced him into this a little bit, and eventually ended up with that ultra-wide. I went on a, I think, months-long search for the perfect in front of me monitor like that.

And I ultimately decided on some strip monitors, right? And what I mean by a strip monitor, these are ultra-altruides, right? Usually like a 32-9 or something like that, where traditionally they've been used for, like, advertising kind of like, you know, text bars. and that kind of thing. I have ended up with a couple different varieties of these, but the one I'm currently

using here at home is an ASUS one. It's a 14 inch. It has touch functionality if you're on the PC, but on the Mac, it's, you know, touch is not great. But it can be powered by USBC, HDMI connections, obviously, as well. And it's great because it's right in front of me. I have three scopes on it all the time

from Omniscope, right? I have, you know, my YRGB parade, I have a regular vector scope, and I have a HTML vector scope on it, right? So the primary data that I need most of the time, I can click some buttons on my stream deck to switch layouts on it very quickly, depending on what I'm doing.

But the point is that it keeps me kind of looking straight and centered, don't have to take my eyes off of much, turn around. And because it's nice and small, it doesn't take up a lot of extra room on the desk as well. There's a whole variety of these on Amazon and, you know, Alibaba and stuff like that. The one thing I'll just warn you about, and this is why you kind of peter,

out on these was because, you know, a lot of these are really just kind of raw monitors, right? They don't have a lot of them, the cheaper ones, are not going to have a lot of great software support. So you're going to run into potentially EDID support on your computer and trying to get the monitor to display the right resolution. Yeah, basically 80 to 90 percent of the strip monitors you could buy for cheap on Amazon do not report their correct resolution to the computer. And if you're on a Mac, getting around that is a gigantic hassle that involves breaking some of the security built into the system, and I don't recommend. Yeah, there are, there are some freeware or shareware tools to do a little bit more of that on the Mac in terms of, but you can't do it without turning

off system integrity production. Right. There's, there's a massive security risk to do that. There's a whole bunch of gotchas there, but it's something I would, I would definitely consider. And then lastly, the last thing I think about on our desk as we wrap this up is I just want to briefly talk about task lighting. Everybody's probably familiar with the idea of, you know, bias lighting behind your monitors to kind of reduce eye strain, help perceived contrast, that kind of stuff. But, you know, with so much equipment on the desk, there's a lot going on, right? And one of the companies or products that I have really just come to love just because the owner and the team is just fantastic. And that is Medialight. You can find them at biaslighting.com, I believe,

the website or just do a search for media lights. They make a whole lot of different light products for people like us, people in post-production video. They've gotten into a little bit of the home theater market, but their primary stuff is still a lot of the higher-end bias lighting, which is going to give you the highest CRI, highest color rendering index possible using the best LED chips out there. But one of the things they have, and I can see one,

I think that's what it on your deck, that might be a microphone behind you, but they make a little desk lamp that has a little diffuser on it, has intensity change. So for your control surface, your stream decks, your keyboard, whatever,

I got a couple of those on the desk too and I absolutely love them. Yeah, and it's important to note it's nice wide CRI D-65. Right, exactly. So it's not going to conflict with anything else, right?

Now, the last thing I want to talk about that I think ties all of this together and it's something that we've done in both my suite, your home suite and the office. And I think one of the greatest things you can do if you're a little bit of a tinkerer

and you want to really perfect your desk setup by a 3D printer. Oh yeah, man. We have so much 3D printed stuff putting all this together. My stream deck exiles are held up by a mount that I designed that is VHB taped to the desk

and holds them at exactly the same angle and height as the mini panel. 100% man. Right. The mount that holds this scope monitor at the exact angle that I want, 3D printed. Once you have a 3D printer, it will kind of open up your mind to, oh, well, I wish my desk had this little widget to hold this little button that I saw on Amazon. Great. Now you can. There's huge communities of people that will just, you know, give out

models to print. And also, honestly, designing things in CAD is not that difficult. Again, if you're a tinkerer kind of person, not everybody is. Hold on, hold a second. Because there's a, that's, you know, it seems like it's this like, oh, yeah, just become a CAD designer and do it. The communities for 3D printing is huge these days, right? And there are so many, I'm thinking of websites like thing averse, right? Or a person has their own, right? Where, like, there are people who contribute designs that they made for their specific need.

A lot of those, you know, you can just download the design files and just, you know, go right away, go ahead and print. Some of them can be what they refer to, the industry term, I think, is remit. mixing, right, where you can kind of take a design, bring into your CAD software, kind of, you know, rejigger it to your specific needs. But, you know, chances are, like, especially with common things, stream decks or things like Waycoms or whatever, there's going to be a lot of this that's already been, somebody's already put the thought and design into it. So you can kind of experiment with that. But, like, it runs from basic to, like, advanced. Like, I'm thinking of a basic one. I'm just looking at my desk over here, like, you know, I'm always dropping my pen somewhere, right? So I just

printed a little 3D printed pen holder, right, just so I can pop my pen in right there. The other one that I'm thinking of that I absolutely adore is that you actually design this for me. For my strip monitor, it was a little too low behind the mini panel. You built me some, you know, basically bookend feet for it that I, you know, you designed, I printed on my 3D printer at home, and they work great, right? So you can design all these things. Headphone holder, that's another one that I 3D printed.

I was looking on Amazon. I'm like, I'm not going to spend 60 bucks on a. under the desk headphone holder. Well, guess what? Went to Thingaverse. There was about 100 different designs for a headphone holder. Pick the one that worked for me.

Now I had my headphones right where I need them right under the desk. Yeah, silly things. Like, I love old school analog Duros audio meters, right? I don't need them at all. I'm not in an audio critical room.

I just like to watch them bounce up and down with playback. It looks really cool. Right, yeah, yeah. The problem is, they're too bright for a color suite. By far. So I 3D printed a little mount

that I designed to hold them under my UI monitor and hold some Indy filter glass in front of it so they're not distractingly bright and now I've got nice little audio meters from the 80s that looks super cool you know it's just really nice to be able to super customize your workspace to the point where now everything is exactly

where I want it all the time in the exact same shape that I want it yeah I mean dude it's it's so and again I think it's a little intimidating at first but 3D printing you can get into it for a cheapest a couple hundred bucks these days for a for a basic small printer um and you'd be surprised i mean like now my discussion my thinking like you know especially with things around the house or the office is like i used my first thought used to be like oh i'll just go on amazon and get that right because you know that's what everybody is right big box amazon now my thinking has changed for like

huh can i print that so it's i think that's a really worthwhile thing to invest in uh for various things you can create now we're going to wrap it here because we've talked for a long time about tablets and stream decks on and stuff. We haven't even touched on desks, chairs, and some other ergonomic stuff. We'll potentially later do an episode on that, except it's really just going to be Joey espousing the virtues of the Herman Miller-Aryon chair for 45 minutes and me disagreeing with him. So we'll hold that for another episode, but those things are obviously vitally important, too, whether it's a stand-up desk, a traditional workstation console with, you know, chairs you use.

But hopefully now you have a better idea of some of the, the gadgets and things that we're big fans of, have a better understanding of machine room versus insuit. So there's some other things, but if we missed anything that you can't live without, please feel free to let us know. And stay tuned. We'll make me make you an installment three of this

as our thoughts and things develop on it. So thank you, of course, as always, for taking a watch and taking a listen for the Offset podcast. I'm Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joey D.M.