For many, many years, I edited video in Sony Vegas. It partly helped that I had edited some reference books relating to the earlier versions and therefore knew it pretty intimately. I also as many know, am close friends with Sony Vegas guru and evangelist Douglas Spotted Eagle and indeed, am the Australian distributor for his VASST training products.

Now at this point you may be thinking I am about to announce I am switching sides and am going to start using Grass Valley Edius or Adobe Premiere or gasp! switch to a Mac!

Not so, so sorry for those panting away in anticipation. Instead, what I have done is add to my Vegas armoury of tools (that includes Pixelan Spicemaster 2.5 which EVERYONE should use no matter editing application preference) by implementing a Contour Shuttle Pro 2 from Melbourne based Videoguys and a special Sony Vegas keyboard from Corsair Solutions.

And truly, they have speeded up my editing by a huge order of magnitude. So how do they work?

The Vegas keyboard has colour coded keys – 56 of the 84 keys are not black but yellow, mauve, light blue, green or orange. Each key has the normal letter engraved on it, but also the equivalent command for its Sony Vegas command. So for example, the “I” key is yellow and also has in smaller text “Set IN Point”; similarly “P” is mauve and is the shortcut key for “Panning Envelope”. Once you get used to all these shortcuts, it really is much faster than hunting menus etc with the mouse.

Ok, the Contour Shuttle Pro is probably best described as an adjunct to the Sony Vegas keyboard. It has 16 keys on it in rows of four, five two and two and in the middle a large rotary dial with an outer ring. Each of the keys can be programmed to your choice, and is ideally set up with the most common you use in your editing application such as Set IN point, set OUT point, go to start of timeline, got start of clip, loop, play and so on. The rotary dial is for frame by frame movement through a clip back and forth and the outside ring is for accelerated movement.

My placement is the Shuttle Pro on the left, mouse on the right and of course the keyboard in the place where a keyboard goes. With a little practice, you can very quickly and easily flick between all three as necessary. I edited 3 hours of raw footage the other day down to rough clips in less than an hour and had them placed in one of six “bins” depending on the topic. All this done primarily on the Shuttle using the dial(s), one button for Set In, another for Set Out and a third for the “A” shortcut which is “Add to timeline from cursor”.

An added bonus is that the Contour Shuttle Pro ships with templates for a multitude of programs (dozens) and can be easily programmed for any application you like – and as you switch from application to application, the appropriate template is switched in automatically. And it works with the Mac as well as Windows PCs.

Prices:

Pixelan Spicemaster (for Premier, Premiere Elements, Sony Vegas, Sony Vegas Movie Studio, Pinnacle Movie Studio, Adobe After Effects, Avid, Corel Video Studio from USD$59.

LogicKeyboard (also available for Vegas, Premiere Pro, Edius, Media Composer, Cubase/Nuendo, Avid Liquid, ProTools, After Effects, Newscutter, Photoshop, Sibelius, Quantel from around AUD$120

Contour Shuttle Pro 2 from around AUD$150

By David Hague

David is the owner and publisher of AusCam Online. He has a background in media dating back to 1979 when he first got involved with photojournalism in motorsport, and went from there into technology via a 5 year stint with Tandy Computers. Following that, he ran a software distribution company on the Gold Coast and was one of the first to recognise the potential of Microsoft Windows.

Moving back to WA, David wrote scripts for Computer Television for video training for the just released Windows and Office 95 among others, and was then lured to Sydney to create web sites for the newly commercial Internet in 1995, building hundreds of sites under contract to OzEmail including Coates Hire, Hertz Queensland, John Williamson, the NSW Board of Studies and many, many more.

He went back into full time journalism as the Managing Editor for Channel 7's 'Gadget Guy', Peter Blasina's publications VideoCamera and Pixelmag, before starting Australasian Camcorder magazine when these publications were shelved. He lives at Sydney's Avalon Beaches nearly on the ocean front with dog Budweiser and in his spare time is a nut for motor sport, road safety, fishing, science fiction - especially Dr Who - and technology.

David can be contacted via david@auscamonline.com