Use Stream Deck to control Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, After Effects, DaVinci and C4D

[Music] hey guys Todd from sideshow effects again today we're going to talk about stream deck stream deck devices so the first part of this video is going to be about introducing you to the stream deck device and how you can get started with it on a basic level and then the second part of the video is going to be getting into detail showing you how you can use our icon packs and our supplied pre-built profiles to get you up and running really really quickly so first things first you get a screen deck device and you've installed the software and you're presented with this interface here now I'm working with the stream deck excel at the moment the stream deck regular version the 16 to 15 key version works identically to the Excel version is just that with the excel you got 32 keys instead of 15 and I'm gonna be showing you examples using After Effects but the principles once again are the same whether you're working with Premiere da Vinci illustrator doesn't matter you'll be able to use these instructions for whatever application you're working with so here's the interface the stream deck interface that it comes with obviously on the left hand side here it's representing the keys that are on your physical device and on the right hand side are the commands that you can drag and drop on to any one of these buttons to make things happen so the first thing you're going to want to do is click the gear icon here at the top and that brings up the Preferences pane as you can see I have a whole bunch of profiles already created yet will start from scratch but we'll go over to the plus key here and we can add a new profile it creates that double click it to name it let's just call it a e test for now because we were working with After Effects and you'll see over here that it tells us that this profile when we launch a particular application stream deck is gonna be smart enough to know that it'll switch to that file and present that profile to you on your device when it recognizes you switch to that application so here we can switch over to to after-effects so every time I launch after-effects or switch over to after-effects while I'm working on my desktop whatever Keys I assigned in this profile are going to pop up on the device okay we're all good we're going to get out of the Preferences for now and go to building the page the first thing you might want to do is as you can see you've got 32 keys but that doesn't limit you yeah because you can create different folders that opens up another 32 keys on top of that so for example let's say the first the time the first key here we can drag this create folder onto that button and you can see that immediately on the device over here we have the the folder icon now back on the on the desktop here we can give this a name we can say let's just save file and you can see the name pops up there and if you click this forward arrow here this gets us into this page and now we can apply buttons on this page automatically gives you a go back to the previous page button here pretty important or else you never would be able to get back so our first key here we can assign an action that when pressed triggers after effects in this case to perform that action so let's say for example let's switch over to is to after effects and we've got a project to open here so let's say we like this first button to be something like foot layer whenever you're building these you want to make sure that you're building off of the the correct shortcuts so you access the shortcuts in After Effects make the edit menu down to keyboard shortcuts there and presents you this whole dialog box and it has a very helpful search function in outer effects and let's say we're looking for splits let me type in split it refines the list there we have split layer at current time which is in fact shift command D so let's hide this and we go back to stream deck and we know that we want to invoke a action that will be a key press of shift-command D for this button so we do that by going over to hotkey dragging it onto that button and it comes they click to assign dialogue box here so we will do the shift command D and you see it automatically places that in the title column which isn't very helpful to us so let's title that as split layer and you can see it automatically will put the name at the bottom of the icon let's go over to after-effects and let's see it in action so here we got our layer select the layer go over to the stream deck press the split layer and it does it instantaneously so you can continue to populate all these buttons to all the actions that suit your particular workflow now there's a lot of different things here in the menus that you can explore and you can experiment with yourself a handy one could be multi action which can allow you to do several actions all at once quickly I can show you you drag this over and then it creates a dialog box where you can then do several things all at once so I can drag hot key into here and I can say well okay let's do split layer but after a split layer and I'll rename that after a split layer I then I would probably want to put a little bit of delay in here sometimes I find two a 50 millisecond delay is sufficient sometimes if you don't have a delay in between your different commands the computer might miss it so you put just with a very very slight delay and then you add in say another hot key let's say that after you split a layer for whatever reason you always want to save so command S will save and we'll just label that save and then to get back out of this we hit the upward arrow here and we can name this here we can say split and save there we go and we can make it like that and you can see we can always get back to the stack of actions by and by this forward arrow here and we can change them and look and see what we've got so now we have on our stream duct device we have the split and Save button they're going over to after-effects let's undo that last action so here we are here I'm gonna hit split and save and it saves for us at the same time so there's a lot of things you can do with all these different actions here and building your own profile to suit it to how you'd like to work but wouldn't be great if somebody's done a lot of the work for you already well that's where our icon packs and and and included profiles come into play so I'm gonna go back here I'm going to delete that button start with a clean slate now in the case of our After Effects icons pack so when you download the pack this is what you're going to see right here we have the the icons all the icons made for most of the commands and actions inside of After Effects and this is the icons that are black on transparent and we have the white on transparent they're all identical from each other and then we have the color ones and they're all different color coded for the different menu commands so we'll work with the color ones today but the first thing you're gonna want to do when you download the package is you want to install the shortcut files because the profiles that are included have the shortcut commands already attached to them you want to make sure that the shortcut command file that you're using corresponds with the profiles provided so there is a PDF document that is included and in the PDF document over here on page three its it'll detail it shows you where exactly you need to drop your keyboard shortcut depending on the operating system you're working in so we got a Mac in the windows and it will show you where to put those that's the first step you got to make sure that you do that restart after effects and then when you're in after-effects you want to make sure you go over to keyboard shortcuts and you want to keyboard layout preset it should go up there and in this case it's called out effects SFX you make sure you load that and say okay and now the shortcut commands that have been assigned for all the profile buttons will work next step to do is you can see the stream depth profile folder here and we're on a Mac at the moments there are Windows versions as well and there are two of them one is for the excel and one is for the regular 15 key stream deck device so obviously we're on a stream deck excel at the moment go to preferences here and we're going to click the downward arrow and say import and you navigate to this folder stream Jack profile Mac and this is the excel I would double click that I already have it installed so I won't do it at the moment and one I have my screen deck excel device because I have two devices hooked up I do know the stream deck regular hooked up as well but make sure I'm in the excel and I pull down the after fax SFX Excel profile and it pops up and you can see it pops up on the stream and activates itself now what's in this pre-built profile well it's divided into the different file menus to make it easy to to navigate and I can either in the stream deck software here I can double click these the way it would it's like a button emulator I can I can access these different things so these are the different tools that are available in After Effects now by no means do these profile pages include all of the icons available with the the After Effects package has over 560 different icons included and there just aren't enough different keyboard commands within the application to be able to do all of them but you might find that you don't use a number of these so you can replace them with the icons or with the shortcut commands that you that you do use and I'll show you how to do that in just a second but for now let's go over to After Effects just quickly to see how this works I'm going to undo the last command and on my stream deck device here I'm gonna page up and this is our main page of the After Effects menu let's say if I go into panels and let's say I want to make sure that my image here is zoomed at 100% by clicking this button it does it immediately for me conversely if it's zoomed down and I wanted to zoom it up it will do that for me on this button now if you're unsure what each one of these buttons actually represents back into the stream deck profile you can click on a button and it tells us right in each one of the titles what the function is and if you choose to you can click the downward arrow show title and it will pop-up so hopefully when you work with it after a day or two you're going to come very familiar with what each icon does if you're forget and that does happen from time to time just more here and this does tell you but these profiles are meant really just as a starting point your workflow is going to be different than then just the keys presented here so for example I'm in the the layer menu here and let's say that I don't see a split at layer shortcut key here well I you know I use that all the time that's something I would like to have here no problem to build on it so the first thing we want to do is create a hotkey onto the empty button here you see right away on the stream decade it responds right away with no matter what we're doing on the software it updates right away and we remember our shortcut key is shift command D split that layer now we want to bring in the the icon for the split at layer now this foot at layer command is not actually in the layer menu because as you recall in After Effects those icons the way they're designed is everything under the layer menu is under that folder but the split at layer is under the edit menu command so we can either go or to the edit command and scroll down and find split at layer and there's the icon I'll it's spacebar to see it and quick you and that's our split at split layer at current time icon and all we need to do is drag and drop it onto the icon button at the bottom there and it updates immediately and updates on our stream deck device once again we hop over to After Effects we have our layer selected split at layer and there it works beautifully so that's how you can quickly build your own pages to your own design in addition let's say that there's some items in the View menu that you use all the time you want to say show the grid I can copy this button swing back over to the layer select an empty button paste and there it shows up on my on my device switch over to After Effects hit the button there's my grid so you can quickly see how how it easy it is for you to build your own profiles see and you can delete any one of these you want move them around I can move this to order here and move this up to here that sort of thing and swap them out you're not really restricted at all you can create all your own profiles and you creat multiple profiles as you see fit depending on your workflow I sometimes will do that I have different After Effects profiles depending on the nature of the job that I'm working on if something has a lot more 3d I'll pull on my 3d stuff into a page and just have them all sitting there on the stream device on one page and it only takes me like 5-10 minutes to quickly set it up now keep in mind this workflow that we've just shown it without effects works in any other application that you're working with them we have attacks with pre-built profiles for outer effects for premiere in Photoshop and illustrator and cinema 4d and DaVinci and Lightroom classic so the same principles apply they all have their own profiles included in each pack to get you up and running but you're encouraged to try and mix and match and build your own with the icon packs provided as always subscribe to us on YouTube follow us on Twitter sideshow effect wit and visit us at sideshow effects net thanks until next time we see [Music]

Channel: SideshowFX

Views: 26,347

Rating: 4.8670697 out of 5

Keywords: motion design, motion graphics, animation, illustrator, cinema4d, after effects, after effects shortcuts keyboard, stream deck, stream deck xl

Id: ny9z6rgJAC4

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 20 2020