[00:00:00] In this ATEM Mini tip, we’ll be looking at a feature that is unique to the ATEM Mini Extreme and the ATEM Mini Extreme ISO. That feature would be the six Macro buttons that are built into the hardware.
[00:00:11] Those six Macro buttons trigger the first six Macros in your collection - but what happens when you have more than six or you want to simply rearrange them? Unfortunately there’s no UI to do that, so to do it, we have to modify the XML.
[00:00:23] To show you, that let’s step into Studio B.
[00:00:27] Here I have the ATEM Mini Extreme ISO. And as you can see on here, there are one, two, three, four, five, six Macro buttons. These buttons will trigger the first six Macros that you’ve created in your ATEM software.
[00:00:39] But again, if you want to rearrange them there’s no interface to do that. Let me show you. In the ATEM software control, if I go to the Macros menu and open this up, you’ll see here that I have seven Macros that I’ve created; Macro A, B, C, D, E, F and G, and I’ve labeled them as such just so it’s easy to track as I move them around; normally obviously you’d give them a proper name.
[00:00:58] If I want to move one of these, I can’t. There’s no way to simply drag and drop these around which, admittedly would be nice, but it’s just not how it works. So, for this example, I want to take Macro G and move it into the ‘A’ position so that it will be triggered by the Macro button 1.
[00:01:14] Of course, if I don’t want to do that, I can simply go to the Run menu, here hit recall and Run and just trigger whichever Macro I would like. But in this case, if I want to actually sign them to the hardware buttons, I’m going to have to move them.
[00:01:26] So here’s how we do it. To do that, I’ll go to the Save As… menu and I’ll give it a name - I’m just going to call this Macros and I’ll put it on the desktop. This is going to save out the XML file which we will need to edit.
[00:01:38] From the Save menu all I really care about right now are the Macros, so to make things easier, I’ll select None and then turn on Macros and then click Save. I’ll hide the ATEM software control and here’s the file that I want to edit.
[00:01:52] I like to work on these using BBEdit, but you can use any text editor that you like. The nice thing about BBEdit is how it color codes and automatically spaces the code.
[00:02:00] I’m going to collapse all of these by option-clicking on this collapse triangle here and then clicking on it again, without the Option key held down to expand it.
[00:02:08] By holding down the Option key when I first clicked it to collapse it, it collapsed all the subcategories as well, making it easier now to see what I’m looking at.
[00:02:16] I’ll open up the Macro Pool and here we can see the Macros that I’ve created: there’s Macros A through G with index numbers zero through six. Now yes, the index numbers are confusing.
[00:02:26] The index numbers start at zero, whereas the Macro position buttons start at one. It’s just the way it is, it’s this way throughout the system - everything starts at “0” in the code; not at “1”. You just have to keep this in mind when you’re modifying things.
[00:02:40] Okay, so remember, I wanted to move Macro G into position one. Right now, Macro G is in index six, which would be position seven but there isn’t one, so I’m going to take index six and change that to zero; again, zero being position one.
[00:02:56] Now I can’t have two Macros occupying the same space, so I’ll go up here and change this index from “0” to “6”. Now, I’ve got indexes 6 and then 1 through 5 and then 0. The order of these does not matter; don’t worry about rearranging them in here. Once you load it back into the ATEM, if you save it back out again, it will actually put them out in the right order, but the order does not matter.
[00:03:18] All that matters is that you do not have overlapping index numbers. So this is ready to go - I’ll save this - I’m actually going to do a “Save As” so that I have a backup copy, which I always advise doing, and then the way that I like to name my documents is by simply putting a time on there. So, I’ll just put -31, and then if you really want to, you could add another name at the end - a note like “Reordered Macros”. Save that and then we’ll switch back over to the ATEM software.
[00:03:45] From the file menu, choose Restore. There’s the one I just did. And once I click Restore, watch the Macros themselves; you’ll see A and G trade places. Restore and there we go - G and A have swapped places.
[00:04:02] So now, when I push button “1” on the hardware, it is going to trigger Macro G, and that is how you rearrange the Macros in your ATEM Mini Extreme or ATEM Mini Extreme ISO.
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