- I went on Amazon the other day, and I bought me one of these. What is it? It's the ShuttlePro 2 from Contour. It's an editing tool that allows you to quickly and more effectively edit your video. At least, I thought I was gonna use it for video, but when I got it, I found that it was far more useful for a variety of other editing applications, which I will share with you today on Dotto Tech. Steve Dotto here. How the heck you doin' this fine day? Now, I bought me my ShuttlePro 2 on Amazon because I was starting to do a lot more video editing and playing around a lot, especially with Final Cut Pro, and I thought I was gonna become a video editing meister, and this tool looked like just the thing to help me get over the hump and become a more efficient video editor. But I ended up still editing my videos the old-fashioned way for the most part because I don't do really fancy editing, if the truth be known, at least when I edit myself. But I did find that it was incredibly useful as I started to produce my own podcast, and I started editing audio on my podcast. I found that the tools that were built, that it gave me made my podcast editing a dream. And as I explored that aspect of it, I discovered all sorts of other ways that you could use a tool like this to become a far more effective editor in almost all of our applications. So let's have a quick look. And I'll start with where I ended up actually using it a lot, which is working with my podcast. Now, the tool itself is designed for, it's just a series of quick keys. It's a keyboard replacement tool, is really what it is. It's got a series of buttons that you can assign different keystrokes to so that your hand rests on the Contour Shuttle while you're working away and you're using these keys instead of going to the keyboard and hitting a variety of different shortcuts. Now, the magic of it, of course, is it's got this dual shuttle area where you can scroll back and forth and moving forward and backwards on a timeline in video or in audio. That's really effective. But that can also be used for zooming and for other applications because each one of the keys on the shuttle is programmable. And you program them all using this tool here, which installs as kind of a keyboard extension on your computer. There's the shuttle settings, and you can see that, we will go through this, we'll go through this in a few minutes. But there's just a bewildering array of different applications that it works for. But lemme show you how I use it in my editing. Now, I use a tool called Hindenburg Journalist Pro as my audio editing tool. But it works very similar to almost any audio editing package. So you see here, and here's my latest podcast that I'm working on, and you can see the waveform of all of my talk here. But let's say, typically speaking, when I'm editing my podcast, the biggest thing that I do is I trim out little nasty bits from the podcast. Like, trim out me clearing my throat or me saying um, or me stutter-stutter-stutter-stuttering. I go through as a I listen to it and I clear out all of the different little mistakes. And if I have a guest on, then I also clear out any background noise, like if I talk over top of them, I'll trim that sort of content out. And so, as we take a look here through the podcast, this is, here, this is probably a breath. I get to recognize the waveform as we go, so let's just have a quick listen here to what I said right here. So what I'm doin' is, I'm just putting my insert, clicking down with my insertion point with my I-beam here using my mouse, 'cause I use a combination. I have one hand on mouse and one hand on Contour Shuttle as I'm editing, and I hit the, there's a button on the shuttle that I use as the play and stop button, which is the thumb button 'cause I use it so often. So I hit that, and we listen.
- [Steve's Recorded Voice] Together, and that--
- And you did, you heard the little breath, the little intake of breath. So let's say that I wanted to remove that breath sound. I'll use my I-beam and I'll just highlight the breath sound, and then on the Contour Shuttle, I have programmed a keyboard shortcut for the ripple delete, where it deletes a little bit of media and then moves everything down on the track. So watch, I'll hit that button and it deletes it, and then I've got another button which is queue it forward two seconds and then play. So I can listen and make sure that I did the edit correctly.
- [Steve's Recorded Voice] Act together, and that all works to--
- And that's how I go about editing. Now, I have other buttons programmed to delete but not move the audio track down, so that's if, like, it's an interview and I have started to interject but my guest keeps going and I want to remove that interjection but I don't want to change the relationship, the timeline between the two tracks. It will just delete that content. And we can, I can basically do anything that I'm gonna do on the keyboard, I can program on the Shuttle. Now, how this all comes together, lemme show you the tool. Let's go back into the programming for the tool, the utility for the tool itself, and give you an idea of just how flexible it is. When you install the ShuttlePro 2, and there's three different versions that they have, the ShuttlePro and the ShuttleXpress, which are all different price points and kinda different feature sets. When you take a look at that, they've got this set of global settings and then they've got all of these different apps that it has pre-sets for. So what they've done is they've shipped us templates that have all of the different keyboard shortcuts that they think you wanna use if you're using that tool pre-programmed in. But it's completely editable. You can change it to whatever works best for you. So as I take a look, for all applications, that's just kind of a global aspect, if you click on down here, on any of these tools, it shows you the key that we're talking about, so in this case here, it's this little key over here in the wing. And it says it does nothing, but if you wanna program that tool to do anything, program that button to do anything, you just go down here and you can basically build a tiny little macro that's going to define what that keyboard shortcut will do for you, or what that key will do, the keyboard shortcut that it will replace. And you can set it up for multiple keystrokes modifier keys, you can even have it run as a little macro if you want. So you can choose all of those different features. And let's take a look at some of them. So it's essentially completely flexible for you to create any series of keyboard shortcuts you want, and then you can save them. Now, when you install it, it also installs, depending whether you're on Windows or Mac, a completely different array of pre-built tools for you, based on the applications, it's application-aware. So it recognizes what application you're in. So for example, if you are in the Apple world and you are gonna be using GarageBand 10, you click here, which is an audio editing tool, and here's all of the editing features for that audio tool. And you can see that, you can actually, if you just use any of the, if you actually use the Contour Shuttle and just press on anything, it will tell you what that key does. This one here is play-pause, button nine. It shows you where button nine is. Button eight, let's see what button eight does. Button eight does record, stop record. Button seven does mute and unmute the selected track. So you will get to know all of the different things that it does by rote as you use it more and more often. And of course, we can edit these at any point. Now, learning to use it is a little bit of a, it's a little bit trial and error, but you can actually pry off the little key, the little button keys and put in notifications, put in little labels that will let you know exactly what button does what. But you'll get to know them pretty quickly as you use it because it's all through repetition. The more you use it, the more you're gonna understand how well it works. But let's go on and take a look at some of the other things, 'cause I thought about it as a video and audio editing tool. I didn't think about using it for many other things. And here you see Hindenburg Journalist, the tool that I use for audio and the audio mix, and take a look at all of the presets that it has as far as audio goes. It's got pretty much all of the different audio editors that Mac users like to use. It's got CAD tools and Autodesk, a complete set just for Avid. It also has a complete set just for Adobe. Did I go through the Adobe set? Yes, here it is. Look at all of the Adobe tools, all for all of Adobe, Audition, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, InDesign, Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere, Premiere Pro, all of the different versions. It's got presets set for all of those different versions of Adobe. It's a huge tool for the Adobe community. But going down, here's something that I want you to think about, because as I say, it does more than just, obviously, in the Adobe world with Photoshop and stuff, it does more than just audio and video, but even down in the productivity world, it has, you have shortcuts if you're a PowerPoint user and you're always building tons and tons of PowerPoint slides, you have here things like duplicating slides and inserting slides and going to the end of a slideshow, and all of those sort of features, all built in. So that's it. It is a, I've got links below to my Amazon links to my Amazon store for the ShuttlePro. It's a tool that does way more than I initially imagined, and in fact, what I bought it for, I don't end up using it for at all now. I bought it to edit video, and I don't end up using it for video, although if I was a power video editor, I think I would use a lot. Now, there are some comparable products that you can think about. One of the products that people talk to me an awful lot about is a tool for live-streaming called the Elgato Stream Deck, which allows you to insert live content into a live-stream. So having bumpers or little inserts or graphics that you overlay when you're doing a live-stream or when you're doing live video production. This is a really nice tool for putting different pieces into your live-stream as you're presenting it. Well, as I looked at what this tool here does, and this one is $149 and it's got 15 keys to basically replicate keyboard shortcuts, I realized that the Stream Deck, if I chose to use it this way would do the exact same thing for me. Now, it doesn't have the nice labeling to make it easier for me to recognize what each and every one of those keyboard shortcuts is, but you've got the same basic functionality built in to the ShuttlePro V2. It's just in a different wrapper, it's just in a different type of package, so you can do some of the same things. Links below. Love to hear how you're using it, if you're using it in a different creative way, let me know in the comments whether or not you use a keyboard shortcut replacement tool such as the Elgato Stream Deck or the ShuttlePro 2. I hope you found today's video to be valuable. Make sure that you have subscribed to our channel, ring that notification bell so that you get notified when we upload any new videos here at Dotto Tech. 'Til next time, I am Steve Dotto. Have fun stormin' a castle!
