So of those people who would love to have a LightWorks Console but can not part with the $3,000+, what features would you want and what kind of button layout would be best? Assume buttons about the same size as a standard computer keyboard or slightly larger. Probably a clear key cap and probably slightly contoured.

Heart of the device would be a ShuttlePro v2, but with the buttons changed for something a little higher quality and arranged in a more ergonomic way. This gives us 15 buttons to work with, and it looks like the buttons can be fully programmed to match the software features.

Assuming it is worth doing, there is a possibility that Contour Designs might be interested in producing it since they have the electronics already build and it just needs the buttons moved to fall into a better place.

With high quality components I would expect the target retail price to be around $300 to $500 USD. With components equal to the ShuttlePro I would expect retail to be $200 or less.

Sitting here looking at a pile of 17mm keycaps trying to figure out how I would arrange the buttons. There are fifteen choices on the ShuttleProV2, of those 3 would be forward (play), reverse (backwards play), and stop. A fourth would be a mode key which lets you flip through 3 levels of assignments for the controller which would give about 33 function keys. Two of those would be the Left and Right jump keys (Avid a and s keys) to move through your edits/cues/markers (mode one and maybe two). Trying to keep mode three for live cuts since most of us don't you multicam mode, they can always be reassigned.

Thinking I might need to go down to 12mm buttons, at least for a few of them.

Just found something that has made me rethink everything I was doing... I can not make anything decent for a price that competes with this:
www.xkeys.com/xkeys/xkedit.php

Anyone here ever use this jog/shuttle/keyboard?

Again not as nice as the LW console, but at less than 1/10 the price it might be good enough for many users. And since it appears to be completely programmable it should work with any editing software that you may choose to use.

I also did score a Shuttlepro v2 on ebay so I may still make something from it, but now don't want to dump much more money into the project which is basically required to improve it.

Still thinking about the ShuttlePro v2 conversion, would be nice if it had about 5 more buttons.
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Need to find a smaller trackball to put in/on the panel. It is a sloping box with a raised "bridge" panel for the upper switches (the one on the right).
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The ShuttlePro has 3 modes that can be programmed, so that effectively increases the number of buttons, but I hate to flip through a bunch of modes to get work done and I don't think there are any indication lights that can be used, still need to research this option a little bit more to see how it really operates.

Sounds interesting. Good luck with your research.

Greg_E wrote:


No indicator lights but if you click on the taskbar icon for the driver it shows you what settings are currently active. Also, when you switch options, a tooltip balloon pops up to tell you what settings are currently active.