So to give you guys some background. I work at a small-ish live production company. Some of our OB vans use Blackmagic Design switchers. They're pretty great. But since my boss is a little saver (and because BMD products are in general not that reliable) he won't pay for the ATEM Hardware Panel. I know, it's not that expensive and it would make work so much easier, especially using Keyers etc.
So since I'm no getting a Hardware Console, I have to live with working with the few keyboard hotkeys provided in the ATEM software. But I still have to do a lot with the mouse. And it's simply not practical at all.
So I went out and looked for alternatives, software to get more hotkeys on the keyboard. But as of right now, this is not working out at all.
I downloaded the latest version of "JustMacros". It talks to the switcher and can send commands for pretty much every function in the switcher. But JustMacros is hard to program in and there is very little documentation on their webpage. Also, it is meant to be used with "Xkeys". But those customizable keyboards are also in the 200+ dollar price range and not that easy to order to Germany.
And so, because I'm just a script kiddy, I used a preset from "JustMacros", that launches the Macros programmed inside the ATEM software with Shortcuts (Shift+F1 - Shift+F12; CTRL+F1-F12 etc.). If I then create a Macro inside the ATEM software, I can control them with those button combinations and they work out just fine.
Looking around on YouTube, I then found a nice little software called "AutoHotKeys". It can, for example, map keyboard combinations to a single button. Essentially create Macros to be accessed by the press of a single button. This sounded awesome because I obviously don't want to use keyboard combinations too much when controlling the video switcher.
The third program I used, and I tried two for this purpose, was Interception (at first I tried LuaMacros). This piece of software lets the user attach multiple keyboards to a computer and used separately. Normally Windows can't distinguish between different keyboards, they're just handled as one.
So while all of this sounds simple and logical, I cannot get it to work. As I said, the shortcuts from JustMacros work just fine, when actually pressing them on the keyboard. But with it being emulated essentially on a second keyboard through AutoHotKey and Interception (or LuaMacros). Some commands don’t come through to the ATEM at all working this way, some do, but can be altered by having different options turned on in the software. But, just to make this clear, the JustMacros Shortcuts respond just fine and are not altered by those options turned on or off.
I hope someone out there has done this and figured this out before I even had the idea for this and can help me or even potentionally provide some code. I'm really no pro at all. And I just don't know what else to do. I'm really motivated to get this to work but I don't have any more ideas.
Greetings from Germany,
Robert