I just purchased a Bamboo Create, by Wacom. It's far from the best tablet you can buy, but I feel like it's a pretty decent tool at a far lower price than the Intuos line of tablets. The Intuos line offers many more features, including a shuttle wheel and a few more buttons, so if money is no object, go for one of those.
After I installed the drivers, I immediately noticed how easy it became to navigate the computer screen. It's so much easier than a mouse, I am now kicking myself for not giving it a try before now.
Since I mostly edit with Final Cut Pro 7, I will be explaining how I've set up my tablet for use with Final Cut. Eventually I may write a follow up post about my experience using this tablet with Avid Media Composer or After Effects.
Setting up your tablet for editing
There are four programmable buttons on the tablet itself, and two programmable buttons on the pen. I tried thinking of the commands that would most benefit me to have quickly on hand. Your preference may be different than mine, but I felt like a good place to start would be:
- Option
- Shift
- Render
- Snapping
- Pop Up Menu
- Right Click
The first four are keys I mapped to the buttons on the tablet. The last two are mapped to the pen. The coolest option for configuring these buttons, is the ability to have a pop up menu. I've put the pop-up menu on the bottom position of the pen, closest to my index finger for easy access.
I've set up the pop-up menu with what I consider the most essential tools. These would be:
I've set up the pop-up menu with what I consider the most essential tools. These would be:
- Selection Tool
- Blade
- Pen Tool
- Roller
- Undo
I use these more than any other tool. Another one I might consider adding is Audio Crossfade.
Using your tablet with more than one program
One advantage other tablets have over the Bamboo series is the ability to automatically switch your key mapping when you enter another program. I don't know about the Intuos series, but I know that Cintiq monitors are really good at this. The Bamboo does't offer any such feature, but if you switch between different programs fairly often, there is a work-around might help you out.
- With your tablet plugged into your computer, go to the Bamboo Utility located in the Bamboo folder in your Applications directory.
- Click Back Up
- Save the back up to a folder. I saved mine to a folder called, "Wacom Tablet Presets".
Now, you can map your buttons to commands and keystrokes for a different program. When you're satisfied, repeat the above steps. If you're working in Photoshop and you want to load in the presets for Final Cut, just find the backup file you created and open it. This isn't as nifty as the tablet automatically switching, but it gets the job done. Also, if you're like me and you are often bringing your tablet to use on another computer, you can throw these back up files onto a flash drive or a dropbox and just load them in to your other workstations. Always make sure to install the drivers first, in fact it might be a good idea to copy the install disc over to a flash drive too.
Conclusion
Another really cool feature of this tablet is that it can be used as a multi-touch work surface too. I'm not using it at the moment, but it was worth a mention because some people might want to experiment with using gestures for editing, and if you do, please let me know how you like it.
If having these tools literally right at my fingertips doesn't speed up my workflow, I don't know if anything will. This should be a pretty good configuration to get me started with tablet based editing. I'll post an update in a few weeks and discuss any changes I felt necessary to my key mapping. I'm sure I'll find something about my current set up that bugs me.
