I wanted to LOVE this!!! - Monogram Creative Console
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
3,295 words · ~16 min read
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- Hello everyone. Some years ago on Linus tech tips,
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I looked at this thing, the Pallete Gear, this is basically a control surface for video editing,
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photo editing, color correction, and so on.
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It's supposed to be like better in theory than using a keyboard and mouse for certain things,
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and it does look really cool, but the software was a big disappointment
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and I provided them with a lot of feedback
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and many years later, guess what?
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They came out with a whole new version using some of my feedback.
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So I'm actually really excited for this one. We're going to find out if the Monogram,
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they've rebranded I guess, is any better. Ooh, the master console.
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It's supposed to be compatible with the old system as well, and we got an add on
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because this one does not have the slider module as a part of it.
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So let's take a look here. You've got,
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here we go. Okay. Thank you. Well, you're welcome.
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This is unnecessarily large and let's take a look here.
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Okay. This is the core, very important
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without that nothing works. We've got, is it?
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It is! It's USB-C. Thank you.
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Look at that. Look at the amount of, the amount of foam in here!
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Okay. Oh my God.
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This has two different things. You, you can, I don't, I don't even know, like,
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will this work as a good alternative to a tracker ball?
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(popping) We will find out. These are buttons. (clicking)
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Very nice. Got three of these.
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And what else have we got? More buttons. (pieces clicking)
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Dials. (pieces clicking) Ah, they are also buttons.
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Very nice, I like that and they're not ratcheted.
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More buttons. (pieces clicking) More dials.
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And guess what? More dials. I really like it,
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you can snap it all together and do whatever you want. Let's also open up the add on module,
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which is,
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it's exactly what it looks like. It's sliders. I feel like you're less liable to accidentally
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rotate one of these when you push it, compared to one of these, the old dial,
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because this one's just so big. You see that? That's probably why they made them smaller,
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also 'cause you can fit more in, but I like that. You have the build quality of this is,
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is impeccable. And like it had better be for the price.
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It's this Aluminum? I think so. Let's look what the bottom looks like.
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You got rubber grip, which is the only way to go.
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Clearly someone from our inventory has a marked all of them.
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I really can't tell you much without actually trying it out.
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So (finger snaps) see ya right now! Okay.
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Oh boy, do I have so much to say about this
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and so little time and I've tried so hard to like list my thoughts in order,
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and I just, I can't, I can't even, it there's. (sighs)
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I've been, I've been emailing them about this for years. We've been going back and forth.
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Oh, by the way before I continue, look, I forgot to do this peel.
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(peeling) All right, it is better.
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They've done a lot of the things I suggested, and they also didn't do a lot of the things
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that I suggested. I don't know. I give it like a 7 out of 10? For context, the Hasu USB keyboard converter
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that this puppy is hooked up to, I give that like a 10 out of 10.
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I give the Stream Deck XL's like a nine, maybe an eight sometimes.
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The Tangent Ripple, this thing is like an 8 out of 10,
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it's fantastic. I use this for color correction all the time. So I've only been using this
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for Premiere and Photoshop, all right? It supports lots of applications.
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They were like really proud that they have, Final Cut 10 support now.
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I don't use Final Cut 10, I've never used it, I can't evaluate it. Okay. We've got the GUI.
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We've got the software itself. We've got the hardware.
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We're going to talk about all those things. The GUI, I don't like it.
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It's this Apple inspired, let's make everything clean
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and simple design philosophy, that I really hate.
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If your product requires settings to get it to really work properly,
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you need to have those settings. And fortunately, what they did do is you can go to, file,
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preferences, and then click here to, advanced,
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and say all the way down here "Enable debugging of module settings via Manual Entry view."
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You can now go into the code sort of, and,
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and tweak things to a degree, that you cannot do with a standard GUI.
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And I will show you that coming up here, but like this feature alone, if you don't know about it,
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I don't think that Monogram is worth it. They haven't optimized it enough to where
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the standard settings are going to be usable enough,
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and there's just all sorts of stuff where if you don't know about it,
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then you're doing yourself a huge disservice and the developers are doing you
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a disservice by not telling you about it, because there's like right now, there's no manual.
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First of all, you can go choose a, a profile that already exists.
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So like, let's say, I want one for Premiere, it comes blank, and then you can put up the list of like,
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there's some pre-made ones and that's nice. It's nice to start from there. That's good.
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All of that works, but then as soon as you start trying
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to actually change stuff, it's really frustrating. So I'm going to click on adjust any property.
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And first of all, this window is too small. This needs to be twice the size.
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So you've got this huge list to scroll through and find stuff,
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and then, (laughing) the options
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are inside the list. Put these options somewhere else.
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Don't put them in the list that I have to scroll through, and especially if I go back to it,
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I'm now scrolled to some other position. It's really annoying. Let's go to customize for this one.
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Look at what I've got here, I've got down and up, but you only know,
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by clicking on it, that there's additional options. Oh, it turns out that's Shift Down, right?
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And this is Shift Up, but why are you hiding these? Show me everything that I'm working with,
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as I'm working with it. Stop hiding (bleep) in your GUI.
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Okay, here's another problem. There's only five settings for sensitivity.
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I told them (laughing) two years ago, there's insufficient granularity.
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I found out through talking to them, that sensitivity
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is actually just events per turn.
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This thing right here, these are orbiter modules. They have two components to them.
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They have the ring around the edge and then have the tilt mechanism in the middle.
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This works similarly to a joystick. The application itself gives me a very nice output
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of what it's doing, and I actually have this where
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you can see some of them will snap depending on the settings.
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And this one snaps all the way to the X and Y.
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So that's kind of cool. It is Tilt Mode. Now the ring around the edge,
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how the sensitivity works, is there's 240 events
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per full rotation. The high corresponds to a nine,
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and then the, the low sensitivity is a five, but those numbers are meaningless.
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Here's the real numbers. Low sensitivity on the Orbiter Ring,
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is actually 15 events per full rotation.
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The next one is 30, the next one is 60, the next one is 120,
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and finally up here at the top at high, that's 240.
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And that means that if you're doing color correction and what you want is maximum sensitivity,
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and then you want to change another setting.
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The step, I can change that all the way up to a 50.
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You actually have access through the manual entry that I showed you how to do,
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to much finer control, and this is so important.
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What you want is like step 0.7.
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That's the amount that will be added to whatever variable it is,
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per rotation or tilt or something.
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There's oh, I wish I could, I wish I could summarize this better for you guys. Latency, latency is a big problem.
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Let me show you a simple test. Photoshop, let's open that up.
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I can change the brush size by moving this module here,
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but you can see that the delay
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between me moving this, and it actually changing on screen,
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is quite significant. Remember how slow and laggy
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the zoom was on the Loupedeck? Look at how slow and laggy it is!
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Well, guess what? You know, I think it's a little better here,
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but it's not great. And again, compare that to my own
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personal AutoHotkey script, that does it instantaneously with the mouse,
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and you'll see that that's what this device should be doing.
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Now here's the thing, I told them about this, and they said,
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"Ah yes, we know. We've been working with Adobe for the last 10 months on this UXP plugin,
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which is due to be released," they said, late summer.
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And they sent me a video of significantly better
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performance in Photoshop. And I think that's great.
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There's some other things where, for example, a changing brush size.
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That needs to be exponential. Really, it's just going one pixel at a time,
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reducing the diameter. That's not how it should be.
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It needs to be exponential, and that is what they did in the UXP plugin.
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So this will be better. Also, the zoom is not exponential
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and it needs to be, and that's what they ended up doing. Let me show you one other thing
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that's disappointing about the software or hardware, I don't know. It stutters.
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This is something that they said they have not seen before,
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but like, this is actually a pretty big problem. I'm going to move my hand very slowly
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and as evenly as I can, and you can see,
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see that? There is a stutter that should not be happening.
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I was using this to jog around in Premiere
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and it was really great. The only job controlled better,
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is the one on the Logitech craft keyboard, because of the stuttering,
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it's still not good enough. There's a lot of work that they can do to improve their application.
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For example, next and previous profile. Why do I only have those options?
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I should be able to target a specific profile that I want to go to.
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Guess what? The Tangent Ripple allows me to do that. Searching through presets is different
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from searching through customized, and if you really want to like, find specific stuff,
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you want to search through customize. What I'm going to do is, search for a transition,
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and you're about to see how dumb this is, where,
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oh my gosh. Like, first of all, look at how huge the menu is! And it's so tiny.
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I can't see anything! Okay, we've got apply video transition
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to both ends of clips. Apply video transition to ends of clips.
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Apply video transition to front of clips, and apply video transition.
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(laughing) And every single one of them has the entire menu
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of every single transition.
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Why, why Monogram? You make that a separate setting,
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don't make it in the menus. That's dumb. And there's all sorts of stuff like that.
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I'm not perfect. (laughing)
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If you take a look at this GUI, that I designed for them like two years ago,
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I emailed this to them and they're like, "Well we're not sure what problem this is supposed to solve."
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And I look at it now, and I'm like, what the (bleep) was I thinking? It's horrifying,
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and I'm so glad that they didn't do it, but it has all of those controls laid out for you,
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where you can see everything, and affect a lot more than they currently have.
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I recommended that they have the ability for pressing a button
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and for pressing and turning a button, to do different things,
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and they did it! They did it! Click on a dial and go to customize
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and check it out. We've got turn, press and turn, and then just press.
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What else have we got? Low sensitivity on that, Dial turn yes.
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- [Brandon] Taron, how long is this video going to be? - I, I told you my, my thoughts on this are so scattered.
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There's so much, there's so much I haven't even gotten to, and I've been renting for like an hour.
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I'm sorry! The Adobe API sucks.
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Okay. And with so many of the problems that I'm encountering with this,
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it's because it's not supported in the Adobe Premiere Pro,
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API. And there's only so much that the Monogram developers
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can do to get around it. I've been in the API, I've seen just how much stuff is missing.
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Like I told, I told the Palette Gear, now Monogram guys,
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two years ago, please have the option,
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to turn a track off and to turn a track on, like to activate the track.
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They still don't have it, because it's not in the API. The API only has
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(finger snapping) toggle, right? So you don't know if your track is on or off.
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There's no good solution other than, let's just wait and hope that Adobe makes their API better.
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And because the Monogram supports so many applications,
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their developers are spread thin, and there's just a lot that they don't know about.
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They don't know how it should work in certain applications. How can you screw up ripple deletes?
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Oh my gosh, what happened?! I'm in a different sequence now.
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They've probably tested it with only one sequence open and they thought, oh, it's great!
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It works. Pack it and ship it. Every single function that
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they have in here needs to be closely examined by a developer to see
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how should this work, where should the bounds be? If it's on a slider, you know,
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where should the minimum and maximum be? Should it be logarithmic? Should it not be?
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Should there be an acceleration? Should there not be, right?
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It really, really depends. Like a Photoshop brush, it has to be logarithmic.
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(record scratches) - [Future Taron] Hello, future Taron here doing the edit. This lack of optimization and tuning,
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on the Monogram functions is why it's so important for the software to have more
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and clearer customization options. Now you might think that the manual entry mode,
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allows you to use any options you want, but that's not true.
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Even for the stuff I know the code for, the input validation is so extreme,
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it sometimes doesn't even allow you to do it. For example, let's try to change a color here,
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nope, you can't. You're only allowed to use one of these preselected 14 colors.
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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?
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Check and save. Nope. What if you want to change the acceleration curve?
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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.
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What if you want a different value in the middle of a slider versus the beginning and end?
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Well, there's no option for that either. - I still like it.
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There's still a lot of can do. My suggestion for you will be,
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if you're thinking about buying this, go to the website
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and look through the manuals for the different applications,
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that doesn't exist yet, but they tell me that there will be manuals.
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That's important because if there's certain things that you need to be able to do with a control surface,
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and they're not in there, you shouldn't buy it. Right?
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And I would say, if you're thinking about getting this for color correction in Premiere, don't.
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I still think the Tangent Ripple is, is a much better experience
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just because it uses tracker balls. - Hi, future Taron, again.
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Now to present their side, they thought about doing tracker balls,
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they decided not to. Here are some emails from our back and forth.
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It's much easier to hold consistent pressure and direction on Orbiter than it is to continuously
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move a tracker ball at a constant velocity. That's true. The orbiter modules are definitely usable
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for color correction. I just, I really still prefer the tracker balls.
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You might be able to get used to it, I still haven't. - [Taron] By the way,
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there's one more thing that you might not realize at first, you can't just put this together any way you want.
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Like you can't put this here, It will not work because
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the, the little connectors are only on one side.
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Because it's compatible with the old pallet gear stuff, you actually could do something like this
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and then make that work.
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That'll work, but,
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it's just not it's not quite as modular as you might expect, so just be careful about that too.
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I want to like this product so much more than I do.
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I still give it like 7 out of 10. I think it's going to be,
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and it already is pretty great for some stuff,
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but like, it really depends. It needs more work. They should hire me as a consultant.
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Despite the issues, there's still a lot of cool things
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you can do with it. It's pretty damn good, but it should be better.
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A lot of that is on Adobe though at this point, unfortunately.
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Thanks for watching.
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