So it's December already. And it's that time of
year when you might be thinking about getting gifts for your loved ones or your favourite
colorist or editors. And I think I've found the perfect gift for DaVinci Resolve users. It's
the Elgato stream deck. This is a fantastic little device that I've been playing with for a couple
of months now. So in this episode, I'm going to show you how I use it. I'm going to show you
how to configure it. And I'm going to show you other uses for it as well. It's not just for
DaVinci Resolve, I'm using it for all sorts of stuff I've got I've got Spotify on there, Premiere,
I've got websites, I've also stuff just to make my everyday things much quicker with just a single
hit of a button. So let's go and take a look. So what is the Elgato stream deck? It's basically
a small box that's a USB connected device with a series of buttons on it and you can basically
programme those buttons to do whatever you want you don't need to be a programmer to operate
it. I'm certainly not a programmer. I'm going to show you how I work with it. But it basically
comes in four different configurations that is a six button device, there are two 15 button
devices. One of them has a customizable front and that is a 32 button version. Which is one that
I'm using here. So this has traditionally been used by gamers so when they're doing their live streams,
they can just literally press a button and it will change the camera angle or it will give a shout
out or something like that. But over time I've seen a lot more DaVinci Resolve users using it
and that is because it is so flexible you can literally programme this to be any shortcut you've
got in DaVinci Resolve and you've got to at the press of a button. So even though I'm working on
the advanced control surface, the advanced panel, I still find this really useful. So let's
have a look at how it works. So to access the configuration you need to go up to here this
little icon here configure stream deck and it opens up and this is now an emulation of what
I'm looking at on my actual unit. So obviously these are nice little LCD displays, but the it looks
exactly the same as this. So what we've got here is my default profile. This is the profile that
will load when I first launch my computer. So instantly on my front page, I've got access
to Resolve here obviously, Premier Photoshop, have access to my email, and I'll take you through
this in a little while. First I want to show you how we actually configure this ourselves.
So I'm going to make a brand new profile. And by making profiles, it allows
us to do a single button action and move through different parts of the software.
So for example, when I launch DaVinci Resolve, it automatically triggers a new profile, which is
my DaVinci Resolve profile. So I'll show you that in a moment. But first of all, let's have a look
at what happens. You've got this welcome button. If you press that it's going to take you straight
to the Elgato website, so we can get rid of that for a start. Down on the right hand side. We've
got all the sort of function keys that these are doing the programming for us if you like I'm not a
programmer. I'm gonna show you how simple it is to do. So at the top here we've got OBS Studio This
is dedicated to working with OBS, which is what I use for my live streams. But down here where we've
got stream deck, this is what we're interested in. Okay, so these functions down here and these here
are basic functions for getting the stream deck to do something. So the easiest one probably
is this one called 'Open'. If you just literally drag and drop it on. You can then choose the app
that you want it to open. So let's just choose it. Go to our applications. Just choose whatever
you whatever you want. It might be VLC player, for example, Or I want to launch my Nobe Omniscopes. So press enter and that button now will launch Omniscope. It's as simple as that.
That's programme done is as simple as that. Other simple ones is here we've got website
for example. So you can just drag and drop and type in a URL for your favourite websites. So
I've got one that connects straight to radio six music which is what I listened to generally when
I'm colour grading. This text one here is really straightforward as well. What it does is
every time you press it literally types text. So I've got one button here that does my
email signature. So it literally if I'm logging into something, I can just press that
button and types out my full email address. I've got one that's a signature that I use on
emails. So again, you just looking at the text. And every time I press that button, it's going to
write "a stream deck for Christmas". So it's really that simple. If you want more than 32 buttons or
let's say for example, you've bought the 15 button version and you want more than 15 buttons. What
you can do is create a folder. Okay and this will allow you to go to the next tier down. The other
way looking at it is building profiles. Okay, so I was mentioning that when I press DaVinci
Resolve button, it launches a new profile which has all my DaVinci Resolve settings and starts to
get to the next level when you start doing multi actions. So I've got my multi action. I just drag
and drop it on. The first action would be to open and that would be linked to DaVinci Resolve.
And my second action would be to switch profile and change it to be the DaVinci Resolve
profile. And you can assign multi actions to be many different things. It might be it
might be a six step function that you need to do and I could put the DaVinci Resolve icon on
here. In fact, let me show you how to do that. If I click on here, if you press this button
here, you can say set from file so you can create your own icons. You can say create new
icon which takes you into this icon builder, which I'm not a huge fan of To be honest, but it
does work or you can open the stream deck icon library. And in here, there's loads of pre made
icons now, you can actually install extra packs. So I've installed the DaVinci Resolve package
also installed the Premier Pack. And they're just down here so they'd give you a load of
these are absolutely free icons that relate to DaVinci Resolve. So there is the actual DaVinci
Resolve logo. And you can now see that that's been assigned. Now if you want to install new PACs,
you need to click on here... and you go to icons. And down here you'll see lots of different programmes
have made their own icons that you can literally install so you just press instal. So if you want
illustrator, for example, just press install. And that's now installed in the icons. The other thing you can do is look at these plugins. So there are various plugins that you can get. So for example,
I've got this analogue clock which I've installed which I'll show you in a moment, but you can go
down here and there's loads of things in fact, you've even got here their lighting, so
if I install this, you can actually control your, if you've got the Philips Hue lights, you
can actually control them from your stream deck. You see that's now installed itself at the
bottom, so I can switch my Philips lights on and off. I can change the colour of them.
We can change the brightness of them. And that's done all it needs to do is link that
to the Philips Hue system itself. And we're controlling all that off our stream deck, so it's fantastic. So now you've got the idea of how easy it is to actually programme this thing. I'm
going to show you what I've done so far. So let's have a look at my default profile. So across
the top here, I've got all my OBS buttons now, if you ever see me do a YouTube Live you'll know
that I messed up quite a bit because I normally get confused with my keyboard shortcuts. This is
helping me alleviate that problem because these buttons here are talking directly to OBS all
these buttons have come from the presets up here from OBS Studio, okay, so my source here is the
so each of these is a source and I literally have changed it to be wherever I needed to
be. So these are all for my live streaming. This will launch OBS itself. I will be doing a
new live soon so this is probably a good opportunity to subscribe and hit the notification bell and
you'll know when that is. This one here opens my Spotify premiere Photoshop. This is my email,
BBC six music. This is my DaVinci Resolve. So let me just show you what the other ones are and
then I can show you resolve specifically. There's my little analogue clock which I love having down
there this one here is switch profiles. So I can literally cycle through all my different profiles
really easily. This is when I'm on Zoom, so I can mute and mute my camera. Just literally pressing a
button on here. And this starts my stream and this mutes my microphone. So these are all things
that I use a lot. These ones are to do my YouTube channel so this will take me directly to
make comments. As you know, I still do answer all the comments where possible. We even got a little
button to get me there super quick so I can answer your comments. So these are the things I'm using
all the time. But the main thing I'm using this for is when I'm working with DaVinci Resolve.
So let's have a look at this icon. If I click on this one, okay, you can see that it's a multi
action and are two actions. Let's click on that. The first action is to open DaVinci Resolve.
And the second action is to switch the profile. So let's have a look. Let's actually do it and
see what happens and obviously DaVinci Resolve is already open in the background. I'm going to
press the switch anyway. So what's happened now is I've switched to the DaVinci Resolve profile,
and I'm going to show you what that looks like in my configurator and basically I've got always
down the bottom here I've got switch profile and main page I can always go back to that front
page. But up here I've now got the media page Cut Page Edit Page Fusion Colour Fairlight and Deliver
page. Alright, so just by pressing any one of these takes me to that section. So if I'm in the
colour page at the moment, If I want to go to the Edit page and let's just press the Edit button. Okay,
and what that does is loads up my editing profile so Ive now got the Edit page profile. So my profile so far ... I've not completely configured this at all yet; you can buy preset configurations, by the way as
other companies out there doing DaVinci Resolve packs where it's fully featured and loaded, but
I'm going to add a new one for you now actually exactly how easy it is to do that. So this is
my Edit page profile. So when I press the Edit button, it goes to my Edit page profile. And you
can see I've got insert, overwrite all that sort of stuff down here are the markers. I'm going to go
to add the blade tool that is basically a Hotkey. Hotkey is like a shortcut. So all I have to
do here is assign the DaVinci Resolve keyboard shortcut for blade which is Command B and that is
now assigned. Now that icon doesn't look great. It's not very easy for me to see what that is.
So let's change the icon as we did before. I'm going to open the stream deck icon library and see
if there's anything suitable. And in the DaVinci Resolve icon pack which is free as part of Elgato.
I'm going to take this razor blade icon here So, double click that, close it down and that is a far more suitable icon. Now if you want to assign your own things, and there isn't a keyboard shortcut for it in Resolve, all you need to do is go to your keyboard customization and look for key that's not taken.
So to do that if you want to proceed let's say for example Ctrl Shift, you can start pressing buttons
and see if everything's assigned. So ctrl shift G is not assigned to anything. Okay, Ctrl Shift S
isn't. So shift S is audio scrubbing, okay, so you can easily see what's assigned and what's not. And
then all you got to do is add your own keyboard shortcut to that, and then assign that as your
hotkey. So let me show you an example of that. Let's go back to our stream deck. And what I'm
going to do now is go to the colour page. So if I click on this button here, it takes me to
the colour page. So let's just click on here I'm going to click colour that's changed my profile
to be the colour page profile which looks like this. Okay, and now you can see what buttons I'm
using on my stream deck even though I've got the advanced panel. So the main thing I've got going on here
is the most obvious thing I've got going on here is these printer light buttons. So the printer
lights refer to what's going on down here. Okay, so it's these red, green and blue here in the
offsets and I use this a lot is one of my first primary parts of my grading. And now whichever
one of these I press is a quarter point change in printer lights. If I want to bring red up slightly
by one quarter point five just press that once. That means a quarter point I want to move blue
down , so it moves it down one quarter point and let's add a bit of yellow. So there we go. So that's
made it really easy for me to do that. Now I can also do that on the advanced panel but it's
actually much clearer for me to see what's going on on the stream deck than it is on the panel
itself to some functionality is better on the stream deck. If you haven't got advanced panel and
you're working with the other panels, this becomes even more valuable because things like here
you can see just bring up the interface again. I've added these memories so I've got four
memories on here. You could have 32 memories on it or 16 memories on here. I've just put those
into show you what would be what I think would be a good idea to do if you had the mini or the
micro panel, obviously on the advanced panel It's really easy for me to do that. So that's kind of
excessive buttons. However, what I have done is add down here my playhead so I've got A, B, C and
D. Now I've got playhead on the advanced panel but annoyingly now, since the version 17 button
change. I now I have to do this... So to change my playhead as my playheads are down here, I
have to shift down, press playhead and then select the playhead which is actually a three button
press. So on my stream deck, I can do that with one button, press A on here, and that's updated
Goto D and that is a one button press so it's much much easier for me to do that on the
stream deck that is on the advanced panel itself. And I just want to show you how easy it is to make
your own icons. So I'm going to open the software and for my playheads - lets go to my colour page
profile, the play heads, I wanted these actual icons from the interface. They didn't really have
them in the pack looking any good so all you've got to do is go down here. Here's my actual play heads
and all I did was separate them out a little bit. And let's take A and I just press Command +Shift+4 on my Mac, keyboard and literally, screen grabs that so what that does is screen
grab just the portion that's highlighted. Okay, that gave me this little PNG
file, go to my software again. And it can literally take that icon there and I'm
going to replace it. So when I say set from file, Im going to go to my desktop. And it's the last
screenshot that I just grabbed. Open it up. And there it is. So you can literally just screen
grab so I think it says somewhere you need it to be a certain pixel size and whatever you don't you
just literally screengrab like that I don't have to do that in Windows, I'm afraid but I'm sure
someone can put that in the comments. The beauty of the stream deck is you can have multiple stream
decks working together so they actually work in harmony. So if you were thinking of gifting one
to someone and they've already got a stream deck, they're still going to be really happy with it
because you can just gang them together. And if you don't get one as a gift and you're
expecting I'm just getting by yourself one because it's a fantastic bit of kit. I've also
put in my descriptions, they are affiliate links, so I might get a bit of a kickback but it will
be exactly the same price to you. And it links directly to where you can buy the stream links
from so I still got a lot of programming to do on this but I think you get the general idea of how
just how easy it is to use and have functional it is, and it works with any programme you can think
of ... well to the best of my knowledge anyway. There are people writing some serious macros for
this as well. So if you have a look on GitHub, for example, there are tonnes of stuff for Stream
Deck on there. I know some of my friends in the industry have got some very deep knowledge on how
these work and how their macros work, but I'm just a simple colorist. That is how I've configured
mine so far. I absolutely love it. It sits beautifully next to my advanced panel here. Just
it's just a real nice complement to the suite. So I hope that's been helpful for you and look after
yourselves and I'll see you in the next episode.
