The author of this article is reflecting on their experience with keyboard shortcuts and macro development, specifically in the context of video editing with Adobe Premiere Pro. They have been using single macros to automate tasks, but are now looking to expand their capabilities by leveraging multiple actions. However, they admit that their scripting skills have been limited, mainly due to the complexity of Premiere Pro's interface.

The author is familiar with the concept of dedicated autohotkey scripts and has experimented with them in the past. They mention that these scripts allow for a high level of customization, but recognize that Premiere Pro does not offer granular enough interaction levels, which has led them to rely on third-party solutions like Tarun's code from Linus Tech Tips or Junko Fide's scripts.

One of the challenges the author faces is the lack of intuitive keyboard shortcuts within Premiere Pro. They describe how they have to navigate through various menus and steps to access a specific macro, only to find that it doesn't work as expected. This process can be time-consuming and tedious, especially when trying to build up complex macros from scratch.

The author has recently invested in a Stream Deck mini, an accessory designed by Elgato that allows users to customize their workflow with dedicated keyboard shortcuts and macro keys. While they appreciate the Stream Deck's intuitive interface, they acknowledge that it may not be suitable for all users due to its focus on gaming applications.

One of the key features of the Stream Deck is its ability to interact with custom autohotkey scripts. However, the author notes that most tools they work with require dedicated scripting, which has limited their ability to experiment with more complex macros. They express a desire to develop more advanced macro capabilities using the Stream Deck's SDK, but recognize that this may require additional programming experience and knowledge.

The article also touches on some technical details about the Stream Deck, including its capacity for drag-and-drop functionality. When creating icons for multi-action keys, users can simply drag the preview from the Key Creator web page directly onto their Stream Deck icon. This feature is particularly useful when working with folders or other organized systems within Premiere Pro.

Overall, the author's journey highlights the challenges and opportunities of working with keyboard shortcuts and macro development in video editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro. They express a desire to expand their capabilities using more advanced techniques and tools, while acknowledging the limitations imposed by Premiere Pro's interface and the need for additional programming skills.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enstarting today you too can have unlimited power ultimate control of your streaming setup more memes than you could possibly hold Oh add your fingertips they've done it before and they're doing it again but this time quite sucks the elgato stream deck many now available for streamers everywhere available for $99 at a distributor near you full disclosures as always this product was sent free for review by Elgato this review is not being paid for and no one is seeing it or having input on it before it is posted however Elgato has purchased and video advertisements in the past on my OBS masterclass so worth disclosing as always I've raved and raved about how great the Ogando stream deck is for over a year now and al gato Corsair Elgato has released the worthy successor the stream deck mini this little brother to the original stream deck offers all of the same amazing features unlimited macro capability customizable icons and gifts with the LCD screen behind the keys and integration into your favorite streaming apps and services in a smaller and cheaper package the stream deck many is half of the size of the original Elgato stream deck and features 6 keys instead of the original 15 this time the stand is built-in I see why they did this they were able to add more weight to make sure this tiny thing didn't slide around when you press the keys in but this means that you have no control whatsoever over the angle of the deck and the keys and it will still have the same glare problems as the original or anything like that kind of sad as I really wish we could add a 1/4 inch 20 threaded tap to the original to mount it onto like a camera our more production setups and I was imagining many scenarios before I received my review unit where the mini could be easily mounted to the side mixers monitors or keyboards and can't be done now also still no detachable cable why otherwise the build quality is great and what you would expect following the original of gato stream deck as mentioned the keys and faceplate are pretty much identical though my keys on my mini feel less soft and mushy than on my original stream deck but that could easily just be the age difference I've been mashing it one for a year and the new one only for a week or so the big change comes in developments that al gato have made to the stream deck software over the past year to start they now offer a dedicated key creator web app that has dozens of icons and backgrounds and tools to make your custom icons if you're not so hot at the photo shops or what have you it lets you manage multiple layers background colors your gradient overlays your own icons their icons and more this has actually been out for a while I've just never really talked about it maybe I'll finally do a dedicated video on it sometime let's switch over to the desktop and take a look at the stream deck software itself with the stream deck mini here we have the elgato stream deck software which might look a little different from the last time I showed it off and there's actually some really cool functionality here which I'm going to start with because you can see in their actions list on the left there is quite a lot of stuff and a lot of that stuff is stuff that I would not use for example I don't use the Tippie stream service I don't use xsplit I don't use mixer so in the sake of efficiency you can now use these 3 right-click things here or these three little mini icons and then you can actually uncheck things you don't use so I would kind of recommend starting with that just so you can clear up your little interface here and be more on the right path of stuff you wouldn't actually use now we have a more manageable menu and you can go deeper than that that's one of the cool features and the overall UI still kind of looks the same you have your actual stream deck itself which if we switch between my primary one which has all 15 keys here and then you have your smart profiles depending on what that set up so the the general no smart profiles section but then if I switch to this new one it's the stream deck mini though it only has these six keys same setup as before you have the individual keys that you can select and icons you can create right-click and create a folder to create a folder with multiple icons and then you can add individual macros and things like that to the individual keys now they do have saw a soundboard functionality so you can now drag play audio to a button and you can choose what the button does they can toggle play or stop you can make it just play and every time you hit it it overlaps which is useful for the MLG airhorn as I'll show here real quick this is gonna like destroy my ears sometimes I have noticed with the soundboard there is a delay for the first time you play a sound like it has to QE it up into memory or something and so like there's a good split second delay here I'm gonna hit it now there is a delay to it starting up so that's a little frustrating but you're gonna have to overlap you could ever restart the sound effect or you can have it just tell it to loop and then when you hit it again it stops so you can have it just keep repeating itself the default that most people will probably choose is the play and stop that way it will stop when you've hit it if you have something a little bit longer sound boards pretty cool people have been requesting that for a long time you no longer need third party apps or to hook up an iPad to your mixer or anything like that you just have the ability to play sounds directly here it does play to your system sound so if you're setting it up in OBS OBS needs to pick up your actual system audio here so that is important to consider but they've added a couple new things there is now stream Labs support so you can add you can skip stream labs alerts you can mute them you can pause them you can do Oh wheels spin and place some credits and some weird stuff I don't use stream labs alerts a whole lot I don't stream a whole lot so there's that aspect and then they do have stream labs OBS integration as well as normal OBS studio integration so they have dedicated controls for that which is pretty cool so if you only use one or the other you can come in here and uncheck the other which is nice one category that you might think is a little reciprocal is there is now a stream deck category and you can add create a folder which you isn't a macro to create a folder with the button you're just dragging a filter on there but you can have buttons that switch profiles if you if you just want to set up more quote/unquote dumb profiles like you want you know page 1 page 2 page 3 this would sort through them it's more or less gonna be the same folders but especially if you're using a button for it but that option is available to you you can set up a timer and you drag on here and then I can play a specific sound once that timer is complete so we'll say one second I'm gonna hit that button give us one second and it should do something which could be useful for streams if you're trying to do some sort of weird scripted stream or whatever you tell it to wait a few seconds and then hit the button it's gonna do the few seconds and then a few seconds later it's gonna play the sound effect which could be useful for specific streams um and then you can drag a specific button to change the brightness again I don't know why you'd want to do this but the fact that they give you this control is really cool lastly what they have added which this guy here what it was his name the creative chief creative officer I don't see a name here yeah I don't see it but the chief creative officer of red giant actually called this something that I completely agree with and that is that the multi action takes the stream deck from being kind of a creative fun thing to have to have individual push button options to being kind of a must-have because now one button which people have been requesting forever one button now allows you to drag all of these different effects on you know presets and macros onto one button so you can even add a delay in between them which is really handy the timer turns into a delay so I can have sound effect play and then a delay of however many seconds or milliseconds and then you can have it skip an alert you can have it switch scenes so you can do a whole lot all in once you get all of these different options so a typical cliche you know five people might do this but otherwise it's a little cheesy as you can have it here with all one button if for example you're about to go live you can have this one button tweet that you're going live it's in a twitch chat message to those waiting in the lobby saying hey you're going live in just a minute go ahead and play an ad so that people are watching something and then switch to a scene which would be like an ad prep scene and then you can have another one that switches to your live scene flips on some cool lights you can you can do a lot with it and you have all of this custom thing or if you're not a streamer I'm not a streamer if you're not a streamer you can just sit here and queue up a bunch of different hotkeys or text commands now their hotkeys support is still pretty limited I would love to see a virtual keyboard pop up like with my Jenna vation keyboard master software here this pops up an entire virtual keyboard has multiple levels of keyboard control and I can tell it to hit ctrl alt shift or whatever and actually if we look at my profile for my Jenna vation keyboard here with all of my premier macros than does under yeah that's under premier month I actually have a dedicated folder that's not the updated one but you can see here I have a bunch of different macros set for transitions and presets and things like that and premiere that runs to my Hana hockey scripts I have a dedicated keyboard here that can run however many macros and combinations that I want which is really cool but it lets me control it because the limitation here is you only get to run keyboard commands that you can physically type in and activate right here so that means no F 13 through F 24 keys unless you have and I be a model in one of the original ones no weird commands that might pop up something on your desktop I ran into that issue a few times I think they mostly work worked around that but that's it's still a risk you know you're a little bit limited here in you have to physically type it in and things like that but you can queue up multiple hotkeys now I want to be totally transparent with you I have not had the most amount of time to work with this I I have established yeah I will show some footage of my desk I have palette gear which does a few things doesn't do it well but it does a few things and I'm working on it I have my main stream deck which the one is mostly a program launcher for me at the moment it does act as a OBS scene switcher if I need it to yeah again I don't stream a whole lot and then I have a couple smart profiles set up with some functionality that I don't use a whole lot anymore and I need to update and my main keyboard has about 45 to 50 dedicated macros for premiere transitions effects like I said color labeling for the layer labels and some media keys and then I have a ripple tangent and the mini stream deck and I haven't had a whole lot of time in general to figure out how I would use multiple actions because all of my scripting thus far is single macros like all of my transitions die I hit a specific keyboard combination that I would never use dedicated and then it opens up I have dedicated autohotkey scripts this is the wrong one but I have dedicated autohotkey script running that then wait for that and pick up the hotkeys and send a command based on a specific script that modifies the life premiere because premiere doesn't really let you interact on such a granular level so I'm using Tarun from Linus tech tips or Linus Media Group's code to kind of have kind of Junko fide adhere to work within premiere but those are all single actions I don't necessarily do a whole lot that I can recognize immediately that uses multiple actions but I know that they're insanely powerful I know that people have been asking for them and as I mentioned before this guy over here the guy that's this dude he did some pretty crazy stuff he uses multiple actions all the time and he has an example here like when he was working on a short film he you interacted with After Effects a lot and sent like all of these different keyboards to do a whole lot of things all at once that you repeatedly do the cool aspect of this is with the stream deck and this is an advantage over my generation I'm gonna pull this back up here in order to modify my primary macro keyboard that I rely on for my day-to-day stuff I have to pull up their application I have to find my original file that I've been working from that way I don't you know overwrite my macros to pull that up I have to find whatever key is blank I have to then input the command so ctrl alt shift H and then it didn't even pick up alt in there so I have to use the keyboard put that in there give it a description if I want then I have to save that file then I have to download that file to my keyboard flip a switch on it so it'll cooperate reconnected then it's there and then I still have a blank key and I have to go write down something on a scrap of paper and shove it in the key cap or print something off it is very slow it is very tedious and if you have keyboard shortcuts that you want to build up and Enter oh no I do not want to save and interact with within the stream deck you can do this on the fly and change the icon on the fly and so when I do have multi actions instead of going to my generation keypad I'm going to be going to the stream deck because this is so much more intuitive to work with the problem is most of the tools that I work with involve custom auto hotkey scripting and so I just haven't had the energy to or time or resources or know how to set up the dedicated scripting to actually interact with what I want that is the downfall of working with the Adobe apps that I'm using and most I've been I've been shopping video editors and most of them don't have the keyboard shortcuts that I have scripted here which is kind of prevented me from switching one cool thing that I did want to point out about again I will try to have a dedicated video at some point on the on the key creator here but one thing they do let you do is once you make an icon you can actually drag the preview straight to your key well supposedly I don't think it works on multi actions interesting so if I make a folder if I want to change the folder icon drag that on there yeah okay so multi actions get a little weird io since that makes sense you're not gonna be looking at the icons of your multi actions this is you know all behind the scenes stuff okay so when you're editing anyway the whole point and when you're editing an icon on your stream deck you can actually instead of saving the PNG and dragging and finding to it you can actually just drag the preview from the key creator web page to your stream deck icon and be good to go so that is really cool so yeah the stream deck mini is pretty cool and Elgato keeps making their software even better I'd love to see a more fleshed out macro developing toolkit but given that their target audience consists mainly of game streamers I understand why their focus lies elsewhere I just wish I had the programming experience and skills and knowledge to do more with it myself affiliate product links will be in the description below as always while you're down there subscribe for more tech education and consider supporting on patreon to help me keep making cool stuff like this I'm a people's box here make tech easier and more fun and I will see you in the next videostarting today you too can have unlimited power ultimate control of your streaming setup more memes than you could possibly hold Oh add your fingertips they've done it before and they're doing it again but this time quite sucks the elgato stream deck many now available for streamers everywhere available for $99 at a distributor near you full disclosures as always this product was sent free for review by Elgato this review is not being paid for and no one is seeing it or having input on it before it is posted however Elgato has purchased and video advertisements in the past on my OBS masterclass so worth disclosing as always I've raved and raved about how great the Ogando stream deck is for over a year now and al gato Corsair Elgato has released the worthy successor the stream deck mini this little brother to the original stream deck offers all of the same amazing features unlimited macro capability customizable icons and gifts with the LCD screen behind the keys and integration into your favorite streaming apps and services in a smaller and cheaper package the stream deck many is half of the size of the original Elgato stream deck and features 6 keys instead of the original 15 this time the stand is built-in I see why they did this they were able to add more weight to make sure this tiny thing didn't slide around when you press the keys in but this means that you have no control whatsoever over the angle of the deck and the keys and it will still have the same glare problems as the original or anything like that kind of sad as I really wish we could add a 1/4 inch 20 threaded tap to the original to mount it onto like a camera our more production setups and I was imagining many scenarios before I received my review unit where the mini could be easily mounted to the side mixers monitors or keyboards and can't be done now also still no detachable cable why otherwise the build quality is great and what you would expect following the original of gato stream deck as mentioned the keys and faceplate are pretty much identical though my keys on my mini feel less soft and mushy than on my original stream deck but that could easily just be the age difference I've been mashing it one for a year and the new one only for a week or so the big change comes in developments that al gato have made to the stream deck software over the past year to start they now offer a dedicated key creator web app that has dozens of icons and backgrounds and tools to make your custom icons if you're not so hot at the photo shops or what have you it lets you manage multiple layers background colors your gradient overlays your own icons their icons and more this has actually been out for a while I've just never really talked about it maybe I'll finally do a dedicated video on it sometime let's switch over to the desktop and take a look at the stream deck software itself with the stream deck mini here we have the elgato stream deck software which might look a little different from the last time I showed it off and there's actually some really cool functionality here which I'm going to start with because you can see in their actions list on the left there is quite a lot of stuff and a lot of that stuff is stuff that I would not use for example I don't use the Tippie stream service I don't use xsplit I don't use mixer so in the sake of efficiency you can now use these 3 right-click things here or these three little mini icons and then you can actually uncheck things you don't use so I would kind of recommend starting with that just so you can clear up your little interface here and be more on the right path of stuff you wouldn't actually use now we have a more manageable menu and you can go deeper than that that's one of the cool features and the overall UI still kind of looks the same you have your actual stream deck itself which if we switch between my primary one which has all 15 keys here and then you have your smart profiles depending on what that set up so the the general no smart profiles section but then if I switch to this new one it's the stream deck mini though it only has these six keys same setup as before you have the individual keys that you can select and icons you can create right-click and create a folder to create a folder with multiple icons and then you can add individual macros and things like that to the individual keys now they do have saw a soundboard functionality so you can now drag play audio to a button and you can choose what the button does they can toggle play or stop you can make it just play and every time you hit it it overlaps which is useful for the MLG airhorn as I'll show here real quick this is gonna like destroy my ears sometimes I have noticed with the soundboard there is a delay for the first time you play a sound like it has to QE it up into memory or something and so like there's a good split second delay here I'm gonna hit it now there is a delay to it starting up so that's a little frustrating but you're gonna have to overlap you could ever restart the sound effect or you can have it just tell it to loop and then when you hit it again it stops so you can have it just keep repeating itself the default that most people will probably choose is the play and stop that way it will stop when you've hit it if you have something a little bit longer sound boards pretty cool people have been requesting that for a long time you no longer need third party apps or to hook up an iPad to your mixer or anything like that you just have the ability to play sounds directly here it does play to your system sound so if you're setting it up in OBS OBS needs to pick up your actual system audio here so that is important to consider but they've added a couple new things there is now stream Labs support so you can add you can skip stream labs alerts you can mute them you can pause them you can do Oh wheels spin and place some credits and some weird stuff I don't use stream labs alerts a whole lot I don't stream a whole lot so there's that aspect and then they do have stream labs OBS integration as well as normal OBS studio integration so they have dedicated controls for that which is pretty cool so if you only use one or the other you can come in here and uncheck the other which is nice one category that you might think is a little reciprocal is there is now a stream deck category and you can add create a folder which you isn't a macro to create a folder with the button you're just dragging a filter on there but you can have buttons that switch profiles if you if you just want to set up more quote/unquote dumb profiles like you want you know page 1 page 2 page 3 this would sort through them it's more or less gonna be the same folders but especially if you're using a button for it but that option is available to you you can set up a timer and you drag on here and then I can play a specific sound once that timer is complete so we'll say one second I'm gonna hit that button give us one second and it should do something which could be useful for streams if you're trying to do some sort of weird scripted stream or whatever you tell it to wait a few seconds and then hit the button it's gonna do the few seconds and then a few seconds later it's gonna play the sound effect which could be useful for specific streams um and then you can drag a specific button to change the brightness again I don't know why you'd want to do this but the fact that they give you this control is really cool lastly what they have added which this guy here what it was his name the creative chief creative officer I don't see a name here yeah I don't see it but the chief creative officer of red giant actually called this something that I completely agree with and that is that the multi action takes the stream deck from being kind of a creative fun thing to have to have individual push button options to being kind of a must-have because now one button which people have been requesting forever one button now allows you to drag all of these different effects on you know presets and macros onto one button so you can even add a delay in between them which is really handy the timer turns into a delay so I can have sound effect play and then a delay of however many seconds or milliseconds and then you can have it skip an alert you can have it switch scenes so you can do a whole lot all in once you get all of these different options so a typical cliche you know five people might do this but otherwise it's a little cheesy as you can have it here with all one button if for example you're about to go live you can have this one button tweet that you're going live it's in a twitch chat message to those waiting in the lobby saying hey you're going live in just a minute go ahead and play an ad so that people are watching something and then switch to a scene which would be like an ad prep scene and then you can have another one that switches to your live scene flips on some cool lights you can you can do a lot with it and you have all of this custom thing or if you're not a streamer I'm not a streamer if you're not a streamer you can just sit here and queue up a bunch of different hotkeys or text commands now their hotkeys support is still pretty limited I would love to see a virtual keyboard pop up like with my Jenna vation keyboard master software here this pops up an entire virtual keyboard has multiple levels of keyboard control and I can tell it to hit ctrl alt shift or whatever and actually if we look at my profile for my Jenna vation keyboard here with all of my premier macros than does under yeah that's under premier month I actually have a dedicated folder that's not the updated one but you can see here I have a bunch of different macros set for transitions and presets and things like that and premiere that runs to my Hana hockey scripts I have a dedicated keyboard here that can run however many macros and combinations that I want which is really cool but it lets me control it because the limitation here is you only get to run keyboard commands that you can physically type in and activate right here so that means no F 13 through F 24 keys unless you have and I be a model in one of the original ones no weird commands that might pop up something on your desktop I ran into that issue a few times I think they mostly work worked around that but that's it's still a risk you know you're a little bit limited here in you have to physically type it in and things like that but you can queue up multiple hotkeys now I want to be totally transparent with you I have not had the most amount of time to work with this I I have established yeah I will show some footage of my desk I have palette gear which does a few things doesn't do it well but it does a few things and I'm working on it I have my main stream deck which the one is mostly a program launcher for me at the moment it does act as a OBS scene switcher if I need it to yeah again I don't stream a whole lot and then I have a couple smart profiles set up with some functionality that I don't use a whole lot anymore and I need to update and my main keyboard has about 45 to 50 dedicated macros for premiere transitions effects like I said color labeling for the layer labels and some media keys and then I have a ripple tangent and the mini stream deck and I haven't had a whole lot of time in general to figure out how I would use multiple actions because all of my scripting thus far is single macros like all of my transitions die I hit a specific keyboard combination that I would never use dedicated and then it opens up I have dedicated autohotkey scripts this is the wrong one but I have dedicated autohotkey script running that then wait for that and pick up the hotkeys and send a command based on a specific script that modifies the life premiere because premiere doesn't really let you interact on such a granular level so I'm using Tarun from Linus tech tips or Linus Media Group's code to kind of have kind of Junko fide adhere to work within premiere but those are all single actions I don't necessarily do a whole lot that I can recognize immediately that uses multiple actions but I know that they're insanely powerful I know that people have been asking for them and as I mentioned before this guy over here the guy that's this dude he did some pretty crazy stuff he uses multiple actions all the time and he has an example here like when he was working on a short film he you interacted with After Effects a lot and sent like all of these different keyboards to do a whole lot of things all at once that you repeatedly do the cool aspect of this is with the stream deck and this is an advantage over my generation I'm gonna pull this back up here in order to modify my primary macro keyboard that I rely on for my day-to-day stuff I have to pull up their application I have to find my original file that I've been working from that way I don't you know overwrite my macros to pull that up I have to find whatever key is blank I have to then input the command so ctrl alt shift H and then it didn't even pick up alt in there so I have to use the keyboard put that in there give it a description if I want then I have to save that file then I have to download that file to my keyboard flip a switch on it so it'll cooperate reconnected then it's there and then I still have a blank key and I have to go write down something on a scrap of paper and shove it in the key cap or print something off it is very slow it is very tedious and if you have keyboard shortcuts that you want to build up and Enter oh no I do not want to save and interact with within the stream deck you can do this on the fly and change the icon on the fly and so when I do have multi actions instead of going to my generation keypad I'm going to be going to the stream deck because this is so much more intuitive to work with the problem is most of the tools that I work with involve custom auto hotkey scripting and so I just haven't had the energy to or time or resources or know how to set up the dedicated scripting to actually interact with what I want that is the downfall of working with the Adobe apps that I'm using and most I've been I've been shopping video editors and most of them don't have the keyboard shortcuts that I have scripted here which is kind of prevented me from switching one cool thing that I did want to point out about again I will try to have a dedicated video at some point on the on the key creator here but one thing they do let you do is once you make an icon you can actually drag the preview straight to your key well supposedly I don't think it works on multi actions interesting so if I make a folder if I want to change the folder icon drag that on there yeah okay so multi actions get a little weird io since that makes sense you're not gonna be looking at the icons of your multi actions this is you know all behind the scenes stuff okay so when you're editing anyway the whole point and when you're editing an icon on your stream deck you can actually instead of saving the PNG and dragging and finding to it you can actually just drag the preview from the key creator web page to your stream deck icon and be good to go so that is really cool so yeah the stream deck mini is pretty cool and Elgato keeps making their software even better I'd love to see a more fleshed out macro developing toolkit but given that their target audience consists mainly of game streamers I understand why their focus lies elsewhere I just wish I had the programming experience and skills and knowledge to do more with it myself affiliate product links will be in the description below as always while you're down there subscribe for more tech education and consider supporting on patreon to help me keep making cool stuff like this I'm a people's box here make tech easier and more fun and I will see you in the next video\n"