- Hello everyone. Some years ago on Linus tech tips,
I looked at this thing, the Pallete Gear, this is basically a control surface for video editing,
photo editing, color correction, and so on.
It's supposed to be like better in theory than using a keyboard and mouse for certain things,
and it does look really cool, but the software was a big disappointment
and I provided them with a lot of feedback
and many years later, guess what?
They came out with a whole new version using some of my feedback.
So I'm actually really excited for this one. We're going to find out if the Monogram,
they've rebranded I guess, is any better. Ooh, the master console.
It's supposed to be compatible with the old system as well, and we got an add on
because this one does not have the slider module as a part of it.
So let's take a look here. You've got,
here we go. Okay. Thank you. Well, you're welcome.
This is unnecessarily large and let's take a look here.
Okay. This is the core, very important
without that nothing works. We've got, is it?
It is! It's USB-C. Thank you.
Look at that. Look at the amount of, the amount of foam in here!
Okay. Oh my God.
This has two different things. You, you can, I don't, I don't even know, like,
will this work as a good alternative to a tracker ball?
(popping) We will find out. These are buttons. (clicking)
Very nice. Got three of these.
And what else have we got? More buttons. (pieces clicking)
Dials. (pieces clicking) Ah, they are also buttons.
Very nice, I like that and they're not ratcheted.
More buttons. (pieces clicking) More dials.
And guess what? More dials. I really like it,
you can snap it all together and do whatever you want. Let's also open up the add on module,
which is,
it's exactly what it looks like. It's sliders. I feel like you're less liable to accidentally
rotate one of these when you push it, compared to one of these, the old dial,
because this one's just so big. You see that? That's probably why they made them smaller,
also 'cause you can fit more in, but I like that. You have the build quality of this is,
is impeccable. And like it had better be for the price.
It's this Aluminum? I think so. Let's look what the bottom looks like.
You got rubber grip, which is the only way to go.
Clearly someone from our inventory has a marked all of them.
I really can't tell you much without actually trying it out.
So (finger snaps) see ya right now! Okay.
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Oh boy, do I have so much to say about this
and so little time and I've tried so hard to like list my thoughts in order,
and I just, I can't, I can't even, it there's. (sighs)
I've been, I've been emailing them about this for years. We've been going back and forth.
Oh, by the way before I continue, look, I forgot to do this peel.
(peeling) All right, it is better.
They've done a lot of the things I suggested, and they also didn't do a lot of the things
that I suggested. I don't know. I give it like a 7 out of 10? For context, the Hasu USB keyboard converter
that this puppy is hooked up to, I give that like a 10 out of 10.
I give the Stream Deck XL's like a nine, maybe an eight sometimes.
The Tangent Ripple, this thing is like an 8 out of 10,
it's fantastic. I use this for color correction all the time. So I've only been using this
for Premiere and Photoshop, all right? It supports lots of applications.
They were like really proud that they have, Final Cut 10 support now.
I don't use Final Cut 10, I've never used it, I can't evaluate it. Okay. We've got the GUI.
We've got the software itself. We've got the hardware.
We're going to talk about all those things. The GUI, I don't like it.
It's this Apple inspired, let's make everything clean
and simple design philosophy, that I really hate.
If your product requires settings to get it to really work properly,
you need to have those settings. And fortunately, what they did do is you can go to, file,
preferences, and then click here to, advanced,
and say all the way down here "Enable debugging of module settings via Manual Entry view."
You can now go into the code sort of, and,
and tweak things to a degree, that you cannot do with a standard GUI.
And I will show you that coming up here, but like this feature alone, if you don't know about it,
I don't think that Monogram is worth it. They haven't optimized it enough to where
the standard settings are going to be usable enough,
and there's just all sorts of stuff where if you don't know about it,
then you're doing yourself a huge disservice and the developers are doing you
a disservice by not telling you about it, because there's like right now, there's no manual.
First of all, you can go choose a, a profile that already exists.
So like, let's say, I want one for Premiere, it comes blank, and then you can put up the list of like,
there's some pre-made ones and that's nice. It's nice to start from there. That's good.
All of that works, but then as soon as you start trying
to actually change stuff, it's really frustrating. So I'm going to click on adjust any property.
And first of all, this window is too small. This needs to be twice the size.
So you've got this huge list to scroll through and find stuff,
and then, (laughing) the options
are inside the list. Put these options somewhere else.
Don't put them in the list that I have to scroll through, and especially if I go back to it,
I'm now scrolled to some other position. It's really annoying. Let's go to customize for this one.
Look at what I've got here, I've got down and up, but you only know,
by clicking on it, that there's additional options. Oh, it turns out that's Shift Down, right?
And this is Shift Up, but why are you hiding these? Show me everything that I'm working with,
as I'm working with it. Stop hiding (bleep) in your GUI.
Okay, here's another problem. There's only five settings for sensitivity.
I told them (laughing) two years ago, there's insufficient granularity.
I found out through talking to them, that sensitivity
is actually just events per turn.
This thing right here, these are orbiter modules. They have two components to them.
They have the ring around the edge and then have the tilt mechanism in the middle.
This works similarly to a joystick. The application itself gives me a very nice output
of what it's doing, and I actually have this where
you can see some of them will snap depending on the settings.
And this one snaps all the way to the X and Y.
So that's kind of cool. It is Tilt Mode. Now the ring around the edge,
how the sensitivity works, is there's 240 events
per full rotation. The high corresponds to a nine,
and then the, the low sensitivity is a five, but those numbers are meaningless.
Here's the real numbers. Low sensitivity on the Orbiter Ring,
is actually 15 events per full rotation.
The next one is 30, the next one is 60, the next one is 120,
and finally up here at the top at high, that's 240.
And that means that if you're doing color correction and what you want is maximum sensitivity,
and then you want to change another setting.
The step, I can change that all the way up to a 50.
You actually have access through the manual entry that I showed you how to do,
to much finer control, and this is so important.
What you want is like step 0.7.
That's the amount that will be added to whatever variable it is,
per rotation or tilt or something.
There's oh, I wish I could, I wish I could summarize this better for you guys. Latency, latency is a big problem.
Let me show you a simple test. Photoshop, let's open that up.
I can change the brush size by moving this module here,
but you can see that the delay
between me moving this, and it actually changing on screen,
is quite significant. Remember how slow and laggy
the zoom was on the Loupedeck? Look at how slow and laggy it is!
Well, guess what? You know, I think it's a little better here,
but it's not great. And again, compare that to my own
personal AutoHotkey script, that does it instantaneously with the mouse,
and you'll see that that's what this device should be doing.
Now here's the thing, I told them about this, and they said,
"Ah yes, we know. We've been working with Adobe for the last 10 months on this UXP plugin,
which is due to be released," they said, late summer.
And they sent me a video of significantly better
performance in Photoshop. And I think that's great.
There's some other things where, for example, a changing brush size.
That needs to be exponential. Really, it's just going one pixel at a time,
reducing the diameter. That's not how it should be.
It needs to be exponential, and that is what they did in the UXP plugin.
So this will be better. Also, the zoom is not exponential
and it needs to be, and that's what they ended up doing. Let me show you one other thing
that's disappointing about the software or hardware, I don't know. It stutters.
This is something that they said they have not seen before,
but like, this is actually a pretty big problem. I'm going to move my hand very slowly
and as evenly as I can, and you can see,
see that? There is a stutter that should not be happening.
I was using this to jog around in Premiere
and it was really great. The only job controlled better,
is the one on the Logitech craft keyboard, because of the stuttering,
it's still not good enough. There's a lot of work that they can do to improve their application.
For example, next and previous profile. Why do I only have those options?
I should be able to target a specific profile that I want to go to.
Guess what? The Tangent Ripple allows me to do that. Searching through presets is different
from searching through customized, and if you really want to like, find specific stuff,
you want to search through customize. What I'm going to do is, search for a transition,
and you're about to see how dumb this is, where,
oh my gosh. Like, first of all, look at how huge the menu is! And it's so tiny.
I can't see anything! Okay, we've got apply video transition
to both ends of clips. Apply video transition to ends of clips.
Apply video transition to front of clips, and apply video transition.
(laughing) And every single one of them has the entire menu
of every single transition.
Why, why Monogram? You make that a separate setting,
don't make it in the menus. That's dumb. And there's all sorts of stuff like that.
I'm not perfect. (laughing)
If you take a look at this GUI, that I designed for them like two years ago,
I emailed this to them and they're like, "Well we're not sure what problem this is supposed to solve."
And I look at it now, and I'm like, what the (bleep) was I thinking? It's horrifying,
and I'm so glad that they didn't do it, but it has all of those controls laid out for you,
where you can see everything, and affect a lot more than they currently have.
I recommended that they have the ability for pressing a button
and for pressing and turning a button, to do different things,
and they did it! They did it! Click on a dial and go to customize
and check it out. We've got turn, press and turn, and then just press.
What else have we got? Low sensitivity on that, Dial turn yes.
- [Brandon] Taron, how long is this video going to be? - I, I told you my, my thoughts on this are so scattered.
There's so much, there's so much I haven't even gotten to, and I've been renting for like an hour.
I'm sorry! The Adobe API sucks.
Okay. And with so many of the problems that I'm encountering with this,
it's because it's not supported in the Adobe Premiere Pro,
API. And there's only so much that the Monogram developers
can do to get around it. I've been in the API, I've seen just how much stuff is missing.
Like I told, I told the Palette Gear, now Monogram guys,
two years ago, please have the option,
to turn a track off and to turn a track on, like to activate the track.
They still don't have it, because it's not in the API. The API only has
(finger snapping) toggle, right? So you don't know if your track is on or off.
There's no good solution other than, let's just wait and hope that Adobe makes their API better.
And because the Monogram supports so many applications,
their developers are spread thin, and there's just a lot that they don't know about.
They don't know how it should work in certain applications. How can you screw up ripple deletes?
Oh my gosh, what happened?! I'm in a different sequence now.
They've probably tested it with only one sequence open and they thought, oh, it's great!
It works. Pack it and ship it. Every single function that
they have in here needs to be closely examined by a developer to see
how should this work, where should the bounds be? If it's on a slider, you know,
where should the minimum and maximum be? Should it be logarithmic? Should it not be?
Should there be an acceleration? Should there not be, right?
It really, really depends. Like a Photoshop brush, it has to be logarithmic.
(record scratches) - [Future Taron] Hello, future Taron here doing the edit. This lack of optimization and tuning,
on the Monogram functions is why it's so important for the software to have more
and clearer customization options. Now you might think that the manual entry mode,
allows you to use any options you want, but that's not true.
Even for the stuff I know the code for, the input validation is so extreme,
it sometimes doesn't even allow you to do it. For example, let's try to change a color here,
nope, you can't. You're only allowed to use one of these preselected 14 colors.
They say they're going to fix that, but I'm still worried about other stuff. What if I want to turn sensitivity of 7.5?
Check and save. Nope. What if you want to change the acceleration curve?
Well, you can't, I don't know if there's any code for that at all. And again, there's no manual right now.
What if you want a different value in the middle of a slider versus the beginning and end?
Well, there's no option for that either. - I still like it.
There's still a lot of can do. My suggestion for you will be,
if you're thinking about buying this, go to the website
and look through the manuals for the different applications,
that doesn't exist yet, but they tell me that there will be manuals.
That's important because if there's certain things that you need to be able to do with a control surface,
and they're not in there, you shouldn't buy it. Right?
And I would say, if you're thinking about getting this for color correction in Premiere, don't.
I still think the Tangent Ripple is, is a much better experience
just because it uses tracker balls. - Hi, future Taron, again.
Now to present their side, they thought about doing tracker balls,
they decided not to. Here are some emails from our back and forth.
It's much easier to hold consistent pressure and direction on Orbiter than it is to continuously
move a tracker ball at a constant velocity. That's true. The orbiter modules are definitely usable
for color correction. I just, I really still prefer the tracker balls.
You might be able to get used to it, I still haven't. - [Taron] By the way,
there's one more thing that you might not realize at first, you can't just put this together any way you want.
Like you can't put this here, It will not work because
the, the little connectors are only on one side.
Because it's compatible with the old pallet gear stuff, you actually could do something like this
and then make that work.
That'll work, but,
it's just not it's not quite as modular as you might expect, so just be careful about that too.
I want to like this product so much more than I do.
I still give it like 7 out of 10. I think it's going to be,
and it already is pretty great for some stuff,
but like, it really depends. It needs more work. They should hire me as a consultant.
Despite the issues, there's still a lot of cool things
you can do with it. It's pretty damn good, but it should be better.
A lot of that is on Adobe though at this point, unfortunately.
Thanks for watching.
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