
This isn’t a paid advertisement, just a passionate user trying to get out to the technical world about a great piece of hardware that can save you a lot of time in your daily workflow. So consider this a piece of friendly advice to look and explore new options in not only this, but all the technology around you. I could talk at great length about the other features such as two-way communication with programmers such as Stage Timer 2, allowing you to see how long is left on a timer right on the device or even how you can run the Streamdecks off a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, but I fear filling up the entire magazine with my gushing review of the device would make for a somewhat boring issue. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it is capable of.
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All these actions can be configured via the web interface that the Companion software comes with. On a QLab or PVP machine, fade the lights on the Hog, MA or Chamsys lighting console, switch the input on the Analog Way or Blackmagic video switcher, then un-mute the playback audio channels on the Yamaha audio desk.Ī second press of the button can reverse the process and you can even add in delay timings between cues. With all your devices networked, with a simple button press you can start Streamdeck XL the video playback The example I always like to give is the video roll.


Depending on who you are, many things can be controlled or manipulated with it. I have spoken a lot about the history of the product and how it works, but I haven’t given a good use case. That list includes playback systems such as QLab and most lighting applications and consoles. Less than a year later, the list quickly grew from a couple of products to over 60 from the areas of lighting, vision, and audio, with the list growing every day. The software was called Companion and it allowed your Streamdeck device to control most vision, lighting and audio systems using just a computer hooked up to the AV devices via network.Īt first the list of systems that it controlled was limited to the ones that the team at Bitfocus had access to, but due to the community nature of GitHub, anyone could write their own plugin and contribute an add-on to control different pieces of equipment.
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In mid-2018, Bitfocus released their first version of add-on software via the free software and coding repository Github. They began to investigate ways of using many of the devices together, not limiting the output to just keystrokes and adding IP protocols. Meanwhile in Europe, a group of people known as Bitfocus saw a much deeper use for the device.

For the most part the functionality was very basic and just slightly outside of what it had been designed for, which was replicating keystrokes and shortcuts. I remember buying my first one to use for MAonPC and Vectorworks keystrokes as a tiny programming wing for those tight spaces while travelling. However, for those in the entertainment industry it was something much more.
