so today we're checking out the loop deck CT I'm quite excited for this one
basically what this is is a control
surface which is supposedly better than
using a keyboard and mouse here we go oh
nice is integrated with well let's find
out I don't actually know Lightroom Photoshop Premiere Final Cut Illustrator
stream Labs Ableton Live able Ableton Live after-effects audition and I guess
Windows those are nice knobs let's appeal this
and this really reminds me of just straight up a small stream deck but they
have looks like little sliders on the side that you can probably yeah that's
almost certainly touch sensitive over there so very cool apparently these you
can use to change profiles these ones here not bad this this knob
is also a touchscreen which i think is super cool so looking forward to that in
the box we've got also a little manual
quick guide which is really boring
looking frankly what is here cable USB
see thank you thank you for that
and I think we've hit rock bottom it's
like a holographic Pokemon card up in here enhance how you create and edit Oh
everything's going to be amazing we'll see all right welcome to my desk
I've been using the loop deck for a few weeks now and I missed a couple of things about
the hardware first of all these are not sliders I think they're literally just
labels for whatever the dials are and also these dials have buttons also this
one is pretty difficult to keep your finger on because you don't want to slip
off onto the touchscreen and you don't want to slip off to this side it can be
hard to use it's okay the little stops on here I think that's called like a
ratcheted dial listen to that and then this one is not ratcheted
that's just a smooth dial keep in mind I've only been using this thing for a
premiere and Photoshop it does support other applications I don't know how good
or bad it is in those I can only give you my experience and my experience is I
don't like this thing I don't like it
the software feels very unfinished I actually had to check to see if this was
a Kickstarter project and I was on the beta software
I'm not when I'm in Photoshop for example and I hit ctrl shift I it just
automatically brings me to the loop deck and opens up this this inspect element
thing because this is like chromium based or whatever it's like a debugging thing and it's also just like very slow
to use and sometimes the actions will like appear and disappear seemingly at
random because it's just it's so slow to update if you search for a command
let's do audio keyframes see it's come
on searching really slow and then once you drag the command on it clears your
search I feel like every command that's in here at least for a premier needs to
have a written explanation of what it does because like you're just looking
through here and I'm trying to figure out like what is CMD window defense
there's all sorts of stuff in here where I know that these are just the names
from the default API and they didn't change them they don't seem to know what
they're for or what they do you drag them on and try to use them and they
don't seem to do anything open dot item click I don't know nothing happens like
like yeah it's a lot of work to have a written explanation of what each thing
does but that would ensure that it's something that even needs to be in there
and also otherwise you're offloading all
of that work figuring stuff out on to the user it's mmm come on guys you're better than
this maybe you can only have one profile
per application you can't make any more
and it must it must be tied to an application which is bad because now I
can't make backups I can't swap in and out two different
things a lot of the software is just it's hard to figure out even with the
manual and by the way they don't tell you that there is actually a manual
just for the loop tech software but also for like premier there's one for
Photoshop like this is great but it's not in the QuickStart guide
despite how confusing the software is to use it's also not nearly customizable
enough you can't change the sensitivity of dials you can't change the direction
of dials you know which way is going to increase the number versus decrease you
cannot change an acceleration curve a small or the big dials you can't do it
you can't change what icon or text appears next to the dials you can change
what happens when you click the dials if you know that you have to click over
here on the press which took me a while to figure out also you cannot change the
icon or color or image or text on any of
the touchscreen buttons or the touchscreen itself and the worst part is
that for a lot of the functions that
they have they don't have an icon or sometimes that names are all the same
this is one of the biggest strikes against the loop dx/dt like i assumed
that you'd be able to do it like you can for the stream deck with the stream deck
you can put whatever text and whatever icon you want and here's another big
strike against them you cannot open or activates any given application that you
want you are stuck with the ones that they've pre-selected for you from the
stream deck you can totally do it just open an app file and you can choose
whatever you want anywhere on your system including autohotkey scripts but
it's like the main thing that i use to stream that for more stuff you can't do
there are these 1 2 3 4 5 buttons that
you cannot customize you cannot change them all so you can't change the RGB of
any of the buttons at all the physical buttons know they're stuck with the
default colors honestly for most of the stuff that this thing can do it's
usually better to just use the keyboard honestly because your hand is already on
the keyboard you already have all the muscle memory and like the physical
feedback of pressing a key releasing a key and you know that an action has been
sent that's better than the haptic feedback on the loop decks et cuz get
this when you we need at all you just touch it listen it makes
a vibration but that doesn't mean that it's done anything it's done nothing
it always vibrates when you touch it even though the action only happens when
you release so the vibration is doubly useless is telling you something that's
happened when nothing's happened and then it tells me that something's happened when it has happened but I
can't feel it it's even worse on this thing here I
don't know what it's trying to tell me listen what is it doing at least when I
double tap it I get back to normal but like when I move my finger here and then
back I'm not back where I started
so the shuttle command is garbage
it's kind of ok when you're going slow if you go fast it whoa it teleports
around seemingly at random I think what
they did is they tried to get it to like skip over gaps the best one I've ever
used is on the Logitech craft keyboard
to the point where I just want to cut it off of that keyboard and just put it
down here and use only the dial I feel like what they really should have done
is just talk to the users people who
actually use premiere go on user voice and find stuff that you can fix with the
looped xct and here's a perfect example keyboard shortcuts for effects and
presets they don't have it I have it because I did it without a hotkey nobody
else has it and this would be perfect perfect for the loop deck you just press
one key and all of a sudden you have access to whichever one of your presets
you want look at all these there is one command I found that works better on the
loop Dex ET than it does on the keyboard select a clip
if you click on a different row then
it'll select on that row oh that's so cool look at that and then the other
really good things to have on dials and sliders are color correction controls
for which it's okay on the loop deck but honestly if you really want a color
correction in premiere on a control surface use the ripple tangent it is
magnificent I love this thing I use it every day increase and decrease the
exposure I can change the saturation make it really high make it really low
change the color temperature this is the kind of thing they should have tried to
emulate with the loop deck and it just doesn't work nearly as well as a real
physical ball the Photoshop integration is a little better they put more thought
into it I think except that I can't always get it to work I'm in Photoshop
I'm gonna click on the brush tool nothing's happened oh gosh
type tool nope that's nothing nothing's happened I think I have to close out of
Photoshop and reopen it there we go we got the brush tool okay and I can change
my foreground and my background color except did you literally only have these
ones to choose from what if you want brown or grey too bad there are not
swatches for that and even if there were there would be no icons for them and
then you can't make your own icons so whatever you don't even have i conce for
white and black okay brush size opacity and hardness okay great brush to make
the size smaller brush okay okay and I can also change the hardness this way
come on here's the problem you can do
that way faster with keyboard shortcuts if you don't know about this one it's
great so brush tool just hit alt right
click and then you have access to both hardness and diameter and then of course
because I'm the macro King I bound this all to a single button so and then they
also have for example zoom guys the zoom
guess what look at how slow and laggy it is compare
that to the built-in photoshop feature where you press control space left flick
which is instantaneous work so much better I put it on single button because
you know I can this thing is not worth the 500 something
dollars that they're asking for they tried to do too many things they tried
to support too many different pieces of software whereas a a focused approach
like the stream deck where it's like we're gonna make this just for streaming
to start with get it really good for that and then expand out from there or
with the ripple tangent where they're like this is just for color correction
that's so much of a better approach you know it's all beauty and and very little
brains like this thing looks great it looks very impressive and the hardware
is fine like if they had the integration working really well I could see myself
using this but at the moment the only thing the only thing that I might use it
for is Photoshop actions guys this is
this is great mmm let me show you these are all my own
custom actions that I have built and the
problem with Photoshop is that you can only ever assign 44 actions to different
shortcuts whereas because the loop Dex et has API access to photoshop they are
directly integrated there's no need to go through a shortcut I can have
unlimited actions on here check it out 50% smaller and here's neighbor
oh is it not working oh there we go if there's just a delay cuz of course
there's a delay it's a whole group of fish called delay fish like I can do it
with that twelve or whatever but I only have so many keys and if they had only
done that for premiere for prim your presets then that's another great reason
to use this thing all right Oh some things that I do like about it it does have access to F 24
through F 13 let me see here
so I was experimenting with that here you can create macros of sorts they're
called custom actions anything that's in here yet you can add to a custom action
that's great that's perfect thank you and I like the consistent use of colors
for workspaces versus pages versus of whatever and it does look cool and those
are the only things that I like about it just from what I've seen so far look I'm
just I'm so not impressed I want to encourage products like this I wanted
this to be great I wanted to like this but I don't because we need more stuff
like this we need more stuff like the ripple tangent Oh get one of these if
you want to do color correction in Premiere get a stream deck this doesn't have
integration with premier but watch my review they added all the features that
I requested in my review but don't get a loop deck CT maybe maybe when they fix
the software but oh I just I've been waiting I've been waiting for the power
guys to fix their software and make it a lot better
I've been waiting for years I don't use these things because it has a lot of
similar problems to the loop deck CT they tried to bite off more than they
can chew however they do have a brand new system
coming out soon which maybe I will get
to review on ShortCircuit we will see so make sure you subscribe