Logitech recently introduced new profiles for the MX Creative Console into the Logi Marketplace. This is noteworthy in the video editing world as there are new profiles for Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve. When the MX Creative Console was first introduced (and I had one of the first reviews for this new piece of hardware) it was very Adobe-centric as you could get three months of an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for free with the purchase. While you can still do just that, there’s probably a lot of editors and creators out there who don’t use Adobe for their post-production so this might make them take a serious look at the MX Creative Console. And honestly, you kinda do have to take a closer look at it now since Logitech has killed the Loupedeck hardware.

To get to the marketplace, open Logi Option+ and go to customize any of the buttons on the dialpad or the keypad. The marketplace is the purple icon in the upper left.

You can install any number of plugins from this marketplace.

The biggest additions that editors will be interested in are the new plugins for DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro. This opens up a whole new market for the MX Creative Console as far as video editing goes and I’m sure Logitech is happy about that. The 3 free months of Adobe Creative Cloud is a fantastic deal so I’m guessing there was some exclusive deal with Adobe to keep other editing tools off the Logitech marketplace when the MX Creative Console was launched.

 

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What’s nice about these Logitech prebuilt plugins is that they’ve built out a lot of commands in both Resolve and FCP. They also have their own icons built for each command. Good icons are nice when you’ve got a tiny screen on your buttons! What I don’t see is a way to change the command that Logitech has assigned to each of the prebuilt commands.

Resolve, as far as I know, doesn’t have a third-party control surface architecture where tools like the MX Creative ConsoleMX can “hook” into the application and execute commands. So they must use keyboard shortcuts. This falls down if you’ve remapped your keyboard shortcuts as they appear to be built off of default keyboard shortcuts, at least for DaVinci Resolve. This means they might not necessarily work 100% if you have custom keyboard shortcuts. I had already built my own MX Creative Console profiles for Resolve based on the keyboard shortcut tool, and it worked quite well. I even used Sideshow FX’s awesome key icons to build it out.

Hopefully Logitech will adjust the prebuilt plugins so users can adjust the commands to their unique keyboard mappings.

What I can tell with Final Cut, it isn’t necessarily built off specific keyboard shortcuts as most of them still seem to work with my custom mapping. Opening up the Logi Options+ app Digging into the Final Cut Pro mappings, there are a ton of them, including a lot for the dial. Troll down the shortcuts menu, and you could spend a lot of time really customizing your MX Creative Console to FCP. I’ve asked the folks at Logitech about how much of this is based off keyboard mappings vs deeper integration with the application. And I’ll update this article when I hear back.

If you use your MX Creative Console with multiple applications turn on the “Adapt to app” setting under the gear menu in the lower right corner of Logi Options+. This will change the MX Creative Console automatically when you switch between apps in your system.

One place I’ve seen this not work is when I have two profiles for DaVinci Resolve: the basic one that I downloaded from the Marketplace, and a custom one I created a long time ago. I can’t figure out how to make the Adapt to app function work with multiple profiles for the same application.

While there are many commands in these new button function sets, here’s my pet peeve with these things that are created by the company building the hardware: they often replicate very basic default keyboard shortcuts, such as the space bar to play or the JKL keys to scrub, or the I/O key to mark an in point, out point, or specific ranges. Why do I want a piece of hardware to do exactly what my keyboard is doing? The hardware should provide commands for things that are more difficult to do on the keyboard. While you do get a lot of that, it’s still these replications of the basic commands that, while I’m sure that’s great for marketing, doesn’t make a lot of sense in the practical real world. But all the hardware manufacturers do it, so perhaps I’m fighting a losing battle.

And just as an update to my original MX Creative Console review, there are still a few things that Logitech can do to really make using the MX Creative Console a lot faster:

• When using the left and right arrow keys  to step through the different pages on the keypad, please make it loop back to the beginning when I get to the end of the number of assigned pages. It’s a waste of time to have to step back through all the different pages to get back to the first set of commands.
• When bringing up the Actions Ring for the dialpad, I wish there was a way to spin the dial to choose the function that I want to change the dial to. As far as I can tell, when you bring up the Actions Ring, I still have to then use a mouse to click the new function I want on the Action Ring. This is slow and kind of defeats the purpose of a hardware console as you want it to speed up your workflow.
• I wish there was a way to see which button on the MX Creative Console  keypad was a function designed to change the behavior of the dialpad. Currently, there is no indication of that on a button.

So there’s still some functionality and tweaks that would be great to see addressed with the MX Creative Console. But overall, still a useful little tool.