Improve Your Video And Photo Editing With A Gaming Mouse

Gaming peripherals are great for productivity as well as games — they often come with macro buttons you can program special commands for. Over at DIY Photography, they explain that gaming mice are especially great, since the extra programmable buttons can do in one click what keyboard shortcuts may take several to accomplish.

Of course, nothing is going to replace some good, solid keyboard shortcuts, but if there’s no shortcut for an action you want to perform, or you’d rather just program one of your gaming mouse’s many buttons to do the whole command for you, it’s not a bad idea. The team there focused on the Corsair K95 keyboard and the M95 mouse, both of which have a ton of programmable buttons they could tweak just for applications like Adobe Premiere Pro or Photoshop. Some examples:

“Here is one such simple example. One of the buttons on my M95 is configured to CTRL+K which cuts the clip where the play-head is located.

Another more enticing example is what I did when I had to edit a movie with many slow-mo sequences. Regularly, I would have to hit CRTL+R to access the speed dialog, then press 50% and enter. For every single clip….. I made a short script and assigned it to button 7 (see photo below). This made slo-mo-ing a clip very fast, and being a repetitive job, it really saved a lot of time.”

Here are some more ideas for shortcuts both on the keyboard and the mouse:

nesting a clip ([the shortcut you assigned]>enter)

Ripple delete (d>Ctrl+Backspace)

Nudge a clip up/down (alt+up/down)

Cut/copy/paste (Ctrl+x/c/v)

Just think on your repetitive actions and assign a macro for them.

The “photo below” and some more ideas are all at the link below, but you get the idea. You can save a lot of time — and get a better return on your investment in that pricey PC gaming hardware — by putting it to good use at work as well as at play.

One Up Your Editing Game by Using a Gaming Mouse [DIY Photography]