This thread is a spin-off from an early exploration into more thoroughly integrating the Behringer X-Touch Universal Control Surface with Premiere Pro, After Effects, Lightroom, etc.. That thread is here, and while it resolves, it is still a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.
Finally getting this control surface to control stuff!
I miss my DVE's. Some of you are old enough to remember the ADO, Kaleidoscope, A53d and A57, and who can forget the Mirage? Back in the days when editors would cause holes in parquet floors from wheeling their chairs across the console, flailing wildly at multibank switchers and joysticks like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. I have always longed for a return to that tactile, hardware based control.
I have been sitting on a control surface and it's lame integration into Premiere Pro for nigh a decade, now. Let's face it: Adobe's tools for connecting with external controllers is pretty horrible, and we've been stuck with a user interface that is very heavily mouse & keyboard centric. Oh, I've tried a lot of things to make the X-Touch more useful, but each attempt was eventually thwarted by frustration or boredom. But I recently installed a great plug-in called PrControl. Like a new drug, my control issues were in-check for a few days. I now have 6 separate layers of control, some with sub-layers. These layers control audio, including track effects, and a full set of Lumetri Color Controls via faders and encoders (except for pull-downs)...the feature list is strong. The different modes are accessed by using the F1 thru F8 keys on the control surface. But wait. There are 6 control layers, what about F7 and F8? Well, they are just asking for customization, aren't they? That got the juices flowing again.
In the car forums and others we call this a build thread: a series covering the good stuff, bad stuff and the gotchas of doing something complicated. In this case, using Bome MIDI Translator to metamorph the X-Touch when F7 or F8 are pressed. As I learn, I can hopefully help others skip some headaches of using MIDI, which is still bloody amazing, actually.
This thread will be helpful for those looking to integrate a control surface, be it MIDI or OSC, including any of the myriad podcast controllers flooding the market. But it will be especially informative for those with an X-Touch. I have snooped and poked and dug, and I found all of the pertinent MIDI messages to control every espect of the X-Touch, including the scribble strip windows text and color, and control over the time code display - essential information if you want full control over the control surface, and Behringer does not make that information easy to find.
X-Touch has a secret life. Oh, sure, there's the side we see, passing fader information and showing a few buttons we can press. But there's something darker happening in the nether regions of midi that we are not allowed to see. The X-Touch has several control layers available. The main interface used by Premiere Pro is Mackie Control Universe, MCU, or just Mackie. But through the same MIDI channels, Premiere and X-Touch have another conversation on the Ctrl layer, and that is where messages like, "Hey! X-Touch. You see that meter on channel 7 over there? Yeah? Well go turn on the first 5 lights for me, would ya? Thanks, I appreciate you, dude." But they talk way faster than us.
I will be integrating some scripting into the work flow, but whatever I write I will post a link to. In my little helper executable (.exe) file, so far the only feature is that it converts mouse position into a MIDI message and sends it to the MIDI port of choice (actually, the little GUI to make the choice of MIDI port is not written yet, so this program is still in the debug bin and not ready for posting). I use this progam to map mouse cursor position to the first two faders of the X-Touch for coarse x and y mouse moves. Additionally, the rotary encoders for channel 1 and 2 will be used for fine mouse cursor movement. It's two-way, so the when I move the faders the mouse cursor moves on screen, but also when I move the real mouse the faders follow along. I will explain more about that in a later post.
We'll also cover the logic behind my fancy jog-wheel set-up: while in layer 7 or layer 8 of the control surface, the jog wheel navigates the Effect Controls Panel, then when I get to the value I want to change I toggle a button next to the jog wheel, and the jog wheel changes to crank the value selected in the panel up and down; another button would have made it crank numbers in larger increments, and with both of those buttons toggled, the jog wheel becomes fine adjustment. It is a nice way to work in the Effect Controls Panel. It's not a 5 channel K-Scope, but the experience does harken the day. Now I just need to find a reason to wire up some GPI's for the full breadth (only a few will get that one). More to come.
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Adobe does provide a robust SDK and API, and users can always buy a new piece of gear that already has killer software written. But I am a hot rodder at heart, meaning I enjoy building solutions more than buying them. So like Tim Allen, I rewired it. All of the work I am doing is being repurposed for lighting control as well, so even if Behringer wrote a killer plug-in I would be doing this detective work anyway.
For that lighting control I am also building a virtual X-Touch is TouchOSC, so I can control the X-Touch remotely from an iPad while I focus lights. I just finished building all the widgets on the main page. It looks pretty good:
My Virtual X-Touch, buit in TouchOSC.
Some stuff I added, like controls for control room monitor and headphone volume. None of the MIDI messaging has been written yet. It's a blank canvas, for now. I think I figured out a way to fire the meters on each channel. That will be nice, and the meters will be repurposed in the lighting rig to be intensity meters.
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