![Offline Offline](./styles/bmd_universal/imageset/en/icon_user_offline.png)
Xtreemtec wrote:A Im sorry John, i meant the stand alone hardware panels that don't rely on the BMD sdk..
Absolutely nothing to apologize for, just wanted to make sure any casual readers understood there is a difference between some of the solutions being discussed, in terms of use of officially supported SDK and the reversed engineered protocol solutions. For most customers it actually makes no difference whatsoever, but from a kinda "pro risk analysis point of view", there is a "night and day" element.
Ian Morrish wrote:I use a 1ME broadcast panel every week but couldn't do without the extra smarts of a scripting solution to improve the workflow in a live production (I use a rack mounted Mac Mini - running Windows which hasn't crashed in over 2 years).
Example of my XKR-32 layout which I would prefer over the broadcast panel if I could only have one or the other, because I can have a "shifted" key call a function that makes full use of the ATEM (and other) API's...
Ian, it's worth us (or the wide Xkeys community over on ATEMUser) discussing at some point "Key Sets", I'm going to ask PI Eng to print me (make available as a pack) a set of the New Key designs printed up with what I think the "Ideal ATEM XK124 Layout is". But there are so many panels, and combinations of panels BMD customers use to drive the ATEMs, I'd like to gather wider opinions and I'm certain PI Engineering will be interested in your opinion and Power Shell extensions.
Tom_Bassford wrote:+1 for both options!
I run a BMD Panel alongside an Xkeys / JM setup on lots of shows. The BMD panel is ergonomically a million times better than any Xkeys and it doesn't suffer from the cheap buttons and poor illumination which makes Xkeys look shoddy and make it hard to tell what their panels are doing.
Cheers for the plug Tom, Worth checking out the new XKeys buttons used on the vMix layout, are they now perfect? - Noop, Are they much better? Yeap definitely.
Tom_Bassford wrote:JM and Xkeys is a great combination if you are an advanced user with some programming experience. If you don't write any code then you'll find it daunting and will probably need some help to get it running.
Thanks again; IMHO: Code and scripts are the only pure way to communicate with a computer, but obviously I'm fairly biased. Anyone just getting started, help is available on hundreds of topics and thousands of posts, check out the JustMacros subforum over on the excellent ATEMUser Tom kindly runs for our community. You'll find I try to answer most questions but there are many very knowledgeable and helpful users who will help you out if I'm a bit a slow at times.
http://www.atemuser.com/forums/atem-vision-mixers/blackmagic-atems/just-macros
And for those of you like me, who hadn't checked out Kaspars UniSketch (what Tom's talking about), I advise starting here:
![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p2EPx7w3vkU/hqdefault.jpg)