Hi
I’ve taken the pluge an ordered myself a Graphire Classic tablet from Wacom. Hope I like it!
Koba
There are several high-end video-post production software packages that rely almost exclusively on tablet control.
I’ve been in a couple online / colour correction suites that utilize Discreet onlining / CC packages. Watching the operators fly through work with their pens is amazing. These are some very intense apps, and the operators I’ve seen work in them use the pen / tablet exclusively, grudgingly switching to mouse / trackpad when they have to operate in the OS.
I started looking into tablet use after spending some time with these guys, but it doesn’t seem like it’s a very functional system, yet, unless the software you’re using is designed to be run that way.
gesturing needs to be incorporated from within the application. For instance, gestures are used for everything from simple jog / shuttle controls to tool selection, copy/paste, etc. The jog/shuttle controls are a simple, but neat feature… gesturing circles clockwise or counterclockwise gives you fast-forward / rewind, and shuttle speed is responsive to how fast you’re drawing the circles… how handy would this be in final cut pro for seeking through footage? Or for scrolling through the timeline.
From what I’ve seen, there are gesture ‘subsets’ for different work modes… and obviously they’re alterable depending on different pen-buttons and on modifier keys. Also, the high end systems utilize tilt, twist and rotation sensitivity.
Another nice feature is the ability to map keyboard-equivalents to your tablet. For example, you could map F1 - F12 across the top of the tablet, or use a gesture to enable a tablet-keyboard… or whatever.
I haven’t played around with an Intuos, just a graphire2, which unfortunately doesn’t offer tilt-response (and I don’t think any of the consumer tablets off twist response, do they?), under OSX. So far, there are a few promising possibilities, but I can’t find any software package that offers enough customizability to hack-your-own deep gesture support… I’d be interested to hear about anybody elses experience, though.
Ted
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