CONTOUR DESIGN ShuttlePRO V.2 Review

It may be unfair to dock the hardware for what is essentially a software problem, but...

On the mac, at least, this acts as a keyboard wedge (is this the term I'm looking for?), meaning it sends a keystroke, a combination of keystrokes (through a nifty macro writer) or a few mouse functions (scroll wheel, click). So if you can do it on the keyboard, you can do it on the ShuttlePro.

This works great for the buttons, but can be problematic in the shuttle and jog functionality. I was hoping for a driver that would treat the shuttle ring as a unique piece of hardware; instead I need to assign keystrokes to 15 shuttle positions (-7 to 0 to 7) and potentially 28 transitions (-7 to -6, -6 to -5, ... 6 to 7, 7 to 6, ... -6 to -7). To be fair, I'm not certain how or if the transitions are ever used, the documentation is super vague on this.

You then assign the frequency of keypresses per position - from "hold down" to "ten times a second" to "once every thirty seconds". (Or, if simulating a mouse scroll, assign the frequency AND the number of lines/pages you want to scroll.)

Problem is, the effect of sending these keystrokes can overwhelm the software and make it unresponsive - you release the shuttle wheel, the ring snaps crisply back to zero, and the video keeps zooming forward or backward, making accuracy (in some software, at least) impossible.

The laborious nature of tweaking the settings (14 or more tweaks to, say, see what happens if I change the frequency from "Hold down" to "As fast as possible"). Thankfully, these tweaks do take effect instantly, no restarting.

This is likely an unfair gripe for something like final cut pro, which has well implemented keyboard equivalents for shuttling (which the shuttlepro can utilize) and so doesn't suffer from this bogging down. But in my case, it made me still need the mouse... It would be a five star product darn it all!

If I figure a way around this, I'll definitely update my review and give it the deserved bump.

Buy it here now!