I prefer physical buttons over virtual buttons. I like fast access to things without having to figure out what control does what. I've always loved the idea of having a large grid of buttons to access clips but I never used it because I knew I would be counting the buttons to figure out which one was for the clip i wanted to play. In addition to that even if I had an Ohm 64, I'd still be limited to 8 columns. I thought about this for a while and came up with this...
Many lighting consoles and controllers use the concept of "pages". Each button/fader is assigned a function. When a new page is loaded those buttons are assigned new functions. In Resolume multiple pages per deck would allow more than 8 clips to be assigned (or however many columns of buttons you have). A knob would be used to control which page is displayed. When this knob is turned Resolume would scroll to the left/right and jump to the next/previous page. Lets say you have that Ohm 64 with an 8x8 grid. Clips 1-8 would be on page 1, 9-15 would be on page 2, 16-23 would be on page 4 and so on. With this scenario you would be limited to assigning a maximum of 8 layers since the ohm 64 only has 8 rows of buttons. To help speed things up, midi feedback could be used to assign colors to the clip and to the midi controller. Maybe the button could flash when a clip is playing.
Now I know the first thing that will come to most people's minds is "Why bother with pages when we can use decks?" My answer to that is the issues associated with having lots and lots of decks... Decks take time to load and deck names become unreadable because there are only so many pixels on my control monitor.
