Who needs a keyboard and mouse when you can edit your videos with a Steam controller?

There’s been a lot of talk lately about using… “non standard” input devices for using software. DIY Projects such as MIDI2Lightroom, and the Playstation Lightroom Cullinator have led to more purpose built units being built. Products like Palette, a customisable interface of knobs, dials and sliders, and Loupedeck, an all-in-one unit.

For Lightroom, that’s great, but when it comes to video, the options are a little more sparse. Sure, there’s input devices available for DaVinci Resolve, but what about Adobe Premiere Pro? Well, here’s the folks at Owl Bot with a free solution to let you use your Steam Controller with the latest update of Premiere Pro CC2017.

The latest update is version 4, so this isn’t a very new idea. But, in the latest Adobe CC2017 update, the system broke. This release now updates the binds to work with the latest version, once again speeding up your editing workflow. Sorry, though, Mac users, this one’s for Windows only. Although that is planned for the future.

If you don’t already have the Steam client, you’ll need to download it. Otherwise, the first step is to download the bind set from the Owl Bot blog. Once unzipped, you’ll get four files; A read me, a keyboard shortcuts file for Premiere, a file for Steam, and a template showing all of the binds on your controller.

Once all the files are where they need to live, load your Steam client, “Add a Non Steam Game…” and choose Premiere Pro from the list that pops up.

From there, go into Big Picture to check that the binds have set, and then you’re basically done with Steam. The final set is to now set up the keyboard shortcuts in Premiere. So, choose “Keyboard Shortcuts” from the Edit menu, and tell Premiere to use the “OWL BOT SCxPP Layout v4” file.

Then, you’re all done. You can reconfigure things around a little if you choose to do so. Two of the buttons on the controller act as CTRL+Shift modifiers, so you have plenty of ways to reconfigure all of the buttons and dials on the controller to suit your needs. But for now, here’s the default layout.

The video shows the controller in use to illustrate just how easy it is to work with in Premiere Pro. Once you get used to it, it does look like an very quick way to work. And if you’re a gamer, editing videos of your gameplay, I imagine it will quickly become second nature.

For more information, check out the Owl Bot Blog.