MIDI controllers with motorized faders in conjunction with BOME and Capture One

Hi all. I am absolutely new in the MIDI field, therefore please don't throw the tomatoes at me immediately. I am using the Capture One for years now and seeking for the more efficient workflow with the MIDI controller at the moment. The PhaseOne - Tangent tandem looks promising and the controllers seems to be very good quality, but the prices are over my budget. Thanks to the owner of " phodograf.com/controller-1 " I have found an alternative route and learned a lot from this support forum and some others. Frankly - there are not much detailed information I could found over the WWW search. At the moment I am looking at the new Arturia Beatstep vs the used Behringer BCR2000. Both controllers AFAIK are programmable with BOME in order to operate correctly with C1. ( How to achieve it is whole different question for me currently - I am not there yet ). However, I have found a several videos of Lightroom users with the MIDI controllers with the motorized faders i.e. Behringer B-Control Fader BCF2000 or the newer one Behringer X-TOUCH Compact in a conjunction with a MIDI 2 Lightroom plugin or the PFixer. The main feature that attracts me most is while switching between pictures, the motorized faders take the exact position as the correspondent sliders in LR. In other words if you changed the Exposure position to +0.8 and the Contrast to -0.5 and get to the next (unedited) picture the faders will come back to the default position. In case you get back to the previous picture the faders motors will take the Exposure and Contrast programmed faders to the proper position as adjusted in LR. As I have mentioned LR is not my cup of tea, therefore my question is - Is it technically possible to achieve the same effect with the motorized faders with the BOME and Capture One. It will allow me to get rid on those tabs from the screen and get the immediate understanding of the main edited parameters of the certain picture just by looking on the physical controllers faders. The problem is that in my case I can not put my hands on any of the mentioned controllers in order to test them. No one I know personally may offer me one. The rent is not an option as well and unfortunately no money back is offered at the stores for the opened package in my area. Recently I have found a decent offer for the pre owned BCF2000 but for me there is no point of buying one in case the motorized faders will not get a proper feedback from Capture One.

I have a technical skills and an effort of programming this monster is absolutely understandable and I think I am getting into this with my eyes wide open. So please, any of you that may understand my question in a way of a technical implementation, or have any experience with the hardware/software I have mentioned, or have a way to test it without loosing your money, please respond and let me know. Since I could not find the answer on my question googling it, I believe it would be helpful for others to get it straight here. Thank a lot.

Hi,

I don’t believe there is native MIDI support for C1. I think Lightroom has a plugin that gets what you are looking for.

Right now, we can control C1 with MIDI controllers by translating MIDI to keystrokes, but there is no feedback mechanism that I’m aware that will allow C1 to translate exposure information back to MIDI to make faders move.

I’ll keep my eyes peeled though.  If you can point me to a video of someone that has accomplished this with either C1 or Lightroom,  I would be happy to look at it and see how they are doing it.  Do you know if C1 has an API?

 

Thx Steve. I am not aware of an API fo C1. The plugin that is used for the LR is called MIDI2LR – https://rsjaffe.github.io/MIDI2LR/ . Here is the quote from the MIDI2LR WIKI : The MIDI2LR application receives control change (CC), PITCH BEND, or NOTE messages from the control surface, and converts that to your selected action. The action and controller value (if the controller if a fader or encoder) is sent to the plugin, which then takes action based on the selected action and the value. When Lightroom signals MIDI2LR plugin that a develop value has changed, MIDI2LR plugin checks all develop values to see if they’ve changed, then sends the changed values to the MIDI2LR app. The application then checks to see if the user has registered a MIDI CC for that particular develop value (e.g., exposure). If so, the application converts the value to a MIDI CC change message, using the channel that was assigned by the user. If you have a controller that is set up to receive a particular develop parameter on a different channel than it sends it, your control surface won’t track LR changes. Here are some decent videos with the implementation examples : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRwkDZguAQg&t=269s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRb85m9eeyQ&t=170s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWdnWlUO8Ac

Here is the quote I have found on the MIDI2LR google group dated Oct 2016 : Lightroom’s SDK for developers is free to access for everyone. However Phase One asked a couple of thousand dollars for Capture One’s SDK PER YEAR! So no chance to use C/O with a MIDI controller. (Past tense is because they have already removed the possibility of purchasing C/O SDK from their website)

OK, unless C1 has an API or a plugin, not much chance of it happening. You can still control C1 with MIDI by using MIDI to shortcut conversion with MT Pro but it would be a one way conversion. Nothing to allow C1 to update MIDI fader positions.

Steve, seems that you are right. I do think the same way. This is the reason I have decided to post here to may be get a better understanding of how the BOME works. In case it is only the keystroke translator, looks that this case is hopeless…

Does anyone else have any idea ?

I have searched the related topics and found that there is a feedback that the midi controller receives from the capture one software for the knobs lights like it is describer here : https://www.bomeloft.com/support/kb/behringer-x-touch-mini-with-capture-one-rotationary-knobs-configuration . Do I get it right – is it possible to translate the feedback to get the correct lights position ? Is it possible to get the changes for the light from one photo to another ? In case it is, how is it different from getting the motorized faders to the correct position on the relevant controller ?

Hi again Baku. The discussion in the thread that you mentioned was for feedback from the controller through MT Pro and then back to the controller to update lights as you change a control on the external controller. This is possible because the controller puts out MIDI messages (and is the originator and the receiver). In your case, you are looking for information back to the controller that is originated by Capture One, not the controller. At this time, I don’t know of any type of message or signal that Capture One generates that we could convert to a MIDI message to control lights (or fader movement).

Thx Steve. I get it now.
I have checked the Tangent Elements implementation with C1. The C1 value are visualized on the LCD displays on Tangent. Therefore I believe that it is absolutely possible to achieve it through the SDK with MIDI controllers as well.
Until then, it seems that the Arturia Beatstep will take place on my desktop.

OK, Baku. If you ever get any info on the SDK or API, let me know. Note, that you can still control C1 with your Arturia Beatstep, however it will be one way message.

Steve

Thx Steve. I have purchased the Beatstep controller today and getting into the Bome configuration currently.

Sounds good. Yes this is probably a more affordable option for your application.