Hardware to help edit movies...

[xinjingqiao]

Hi,
I spent some time back in the old days with a video editor before computers. The editors I used to use had two knobs that made it really easy to exactly rewind or advance the film to find the exact spot you wanted. Are there any hardware devices like this -for reasonably cheap - that plug into the serial port or USB, etc?

T

[iantri]

Yes, there are hardware dial. knobs, and shuttles of various sorts to be found. Some are more sophisticated, some less sophisticated.

They are not, however, very common (nor cheap). You might try searching Froogle or Pricewatch for things like "knob", "dial", or "shuttle". Be careful with dial, since you will get a ton of dial-up modems.. ("usb dial -modem"?)

Make sure that the software you want to use them with has keyboard shortcuts for things like seeking frame-by-frame and jumping in larger increments. If it does (most do), the doohickey that you buy should be programmable to those keys.

Take a look at the above links, particularly the "more sophisticated" link.

[haloblack]

Are there any hardware devices like this -for reasonably cheap - that plug into the serial port or USB, etc?

Don't know how cheap you need, but they're out there.