If anyone knows what control surfaces are going to be supported by Vegas 5, I'd love to hear from them. If it's going to support the Mackie Control Universal, I'll add that device to my mix of test bed gear.
I'd be more happy with a generic remote option where you can configure Vegas to accept any type of midi control messages... The mackie control is to big and expensive for me, but the controller I built myself last year would work very well...
I guess perhaps I should get myself on that list of those who know, eh? I usually don't bother with beta test cycles, etc. But in this particular case, I'd be willing to sign an NDA and suffer a bit of debugging cycle. If I do that, and figure everything out, I'll post my results here, as soon as the NDA allows. Otherwise, I'll just wait until the release, then begin that test cycle.
I'm probably speaking out of turn. I remember Nat mentioning in another thread how he built some kind of board which would send and receive midi messages, I don't remember what format.
Peter, I might be able to get you some further information on this type of device. I had a hardware design engineer come to me a couple weeks ago, saying he was looking to start some computer based music production , and he was looking to me for some advice on things to get after he explained to me what he wanted to do. Our discussion leaned on the side of hardware control surfaces. He explained to me how he was currently building his own midi controler and he could pretty much program it to send and receive any midi message and it only cost him about 20 bucks and was pretty easy to do. At that point, I looked at him kind of strange and said to him, "no wonder you don't have a girlfriend. Most people buy this stuff, they don't build it themselves, why don't you just tattoo Geek on your forehead?." But, then again, he is a design engineer.
SonyPCH : It's a midi controller based on the open source project "midibox" http://www.ucapps.de
You can build something as simple as a 1 fader controller, up to pretty much what you want, motorized faders, encoders with ledrings, lcd displays, tv output...
The coding is already done for most standard controllers and you can enhance it if you are skilled enough. I am a complete newbie at electronics but managed to build it, the site is very well documented. It costs more than 20 box though, depending on what you're doing. The surface can send whatever midi message you want.
I'm also testing a product called the stc-1000 (www.thinkmig.com) which is a touch surface midi controller, it would be great to control vegas with such a device (for transports, faders etc.)
When vegas 4 came out I also made a setup to use my joystick to control scrubbing and transport, it worked very well, it was more pleasant than the shuttle in my opinion, and yes, I have a girlfriend :p (she thinks I'm weird though :) )