Accom Axial keyboard review (Cherry MX Black)

My god I miss this keyboard. It was by far the best most tank like keyboard I ever used. It was awesome for on-line video editing back in the day. Such fond memories.

Omg the perfect war thunder keyboard.

Nice vid mate

now we need a keyboard that is also the computer and the monitor, then we will have reached peak keyboard

Holy shish kabob sticks!!! 🤯 It reminds me the equipment in the media manipulation scenes from the movie "Wag The Dog". If you eventually get that thing converted Thomas, can we please get an updated video? 😃

haha with that keyboard i will feel like " well then time to destroy the world".

This brings memories. In the late 90s / early 2000s in the school of electronics, we had a session on this thing. We used it to edit a small video clip. We were told by our professors that this is what they were using in the TV channel stations. Of course shortly after Adobe Premiere came along. Keep it up, great videos!

Anything smaller than this is a war crime

It is an edit controller. I worked with these for years back at Turner Studios in Atlanta about 20 years ago.

''''''''''keyboard''''''''''

I wonder what it would be like to use the keyboard's wheel for steering in video games :D

looks like something from star wars

Finally you use some units that make sense.

holllly fuuuuck 🥰

Can you imagine bringing that thing into the office? You’d be fired same day.

God how I want to see this thing powered up I'd love to be able to see you use it and explain certain things on it I wish that I was really technically inclined when it came to being able to reverse engineer stuff like this I'd be more than happy to help if I could

Subscribed at the cheeseburger part.

and I looked at a model F and went "nah, it's just a bit big for my desk." How naive I was

This is how 60% keyboard user's see tenkeyless boards.

What an email command bridge! Bet this would slaughter that inbox in minutes.

Doing colorgrading on this will be almost orgasmic

6 pin xlr connector not din

Your keyboard is in fairly good shape. Most Axial keyboards used in post-production environments developed faded or worn keycaps through heavy use. I purchased a spare one and could tell it came from a television facility that still allowed smoking in the edit rooms as it was quite grimy.

the Accom Flagship

Chyron aircraft carrier dies

Okay you know what the GVG Kaypso is. who ARE you.... someone who knows broadcast.....

jesus that thing is expen$!ve

What other hardware would you need to actually use this thing? Was it designed for a specific computer program?

I don't get the whole 60% thing. Look at me, I gotta use chords and layer keys to perform basic nav functions! The 40% dad is even dumber. I've got my battleship with the extra keys set up in multiple layers / presets, depending on which CAD software I have open. And I like it that way.

Love how he refers to pounds as bald eagles and cheese

A few bits of clarification:
- This is not intended for broadcasting, but rather for post-production film or tv editing. There would be a massive (5-6-unit) rack-mounted computer, and a (usually very large, for its time) monitor to display the editing controller -- the footage would be on several separate monitors.
- The company, Accom, is not exactly unknown in the post-production market. Alas, they seem to have folded in 2005.
- About that display: You'd select "top-level" options by pressing one of the buttons above the display. The button would light up, and the display would show a number of control settings (top row) and current values (bottom row). You could then adjust the individual values by means of those rotary knobs.
- The lighted keys in the block left of the display would light up depending on context. I don't recall if they lit up when enabled, or if there were two brightness levels for "merely available" and "actually enabled", though. Sorry.
- Yes, some of those "seemingly thousands" of keys were in fact completely unused. Go figure.
In my opinion, the typing experience (and the sound of it) is mediocre at best (not as bad as the Mac (Plus) keyboard though), but then again you'd not often write more than a word or three at a time. The rest it did pretty excellently!

Cheers!

PS! Would you consider selling this?

At what point does a keyboard become a control panel because i feel like this really blurs that line

I want one

Imagine using THAT for a week

Bro, this keyboard has an Elgato stream deck built into it lmao

Those stabilizers are better than mine

Is there a video showing where and how Thomas keeps his collection? I imagine it requires an insane amount of space and cleaning effort!

I had the pleasure of using this keyboard and the associated editing system (you should have seen the mainframe) in the mid-1990s through the early 2000s. It was top of the line. Its monitor display was also way more advanced than many of its competitors.

Exactly what is the point of this video? I know many people from Accom - now acquired by Ross Video who have maintained some of more recent instant and slo mo replay products. The Axial edit controller was a fine machine in it's time (mid 90's I think) before general purpose computers could even come close to handling video. It controlled broadcast VTR''s, vision switchers, audio mixers and later on early digital video disk recorders and provided a single point of control for all of them. The integrated track ball and jog wheel minimized hand movement in the execution of edits and controlled all of various connected pieces of equipment. The function of the knobs was read out on the display above and were optical shaft encoders. the functions depended on what was selected for control at the time. There are lots of examples of this type of panel industry where they were created for various bespoke purposes. The Kalypso panel you showed is a vision switcher or mixer and handles only the integration and layering of video sources - generally now used only for live events.

This device was the keyboard that runs the edit control unit. The edit controller was a computer connected videotape machines, video mixers/switchers, special effects generators and Chyron/CG. The devices were usually control by a serial protocol...and it allowed editors to cut, color correction and output finished video product for air. These edit system were called ‘on line editors’ and they were the pinnacle of Video technologies....Until non-linear machines like I have it became advanced enough to take over their duties. everything with the system took a lot of skill. The editor would often have to take a floppy disk of a draft edit and upload it into the edit controller.

The Accom axial was a wonderful UNIX Xwindows based VTR editor controller! very powerful, and very easy to use... you could use a digibeta in preread mode as it's own a/b match frame source and recorder. you could also use a DDR as a frame recorder to cache clips for effects!
it also had a router control panel integrated into the EDL controller, so you could change sources on the router on the fly as sources. you could also do live source cutting with it. it really was a control room in a box!

Was the six din for midi?

Kraft singles are only good in very specific situations all at 3am

Is a fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt included with this keyboard too?

Looks like this is control panel for an Accom Axial A/B Online video editor.
Basically a computerised cross over between tape based online editing and offline editing is software. You would have had it connected to the editor frame that’s a bit like a cross between a Vision Switcher, and a computer. This would control a bunch or Video Tape decks normally 1-2 (A and B, but sometimes even more that two) with your raw footage on, and one that will record you edit onto. This way of Tape to Tape editing was faster than editing on a computer as you didn’t have to load your raw footage onto the computer and record it back off the computer at the end, as you assembled the edit onto your record Tape as you went.
Unlike basic A/B edit controllers that could just do cuts and mixes, an edit controller like this it would let you do more ‘computer editor’ like effects and make an edit that looked like it was done with a computer but with the speed an higher picture quality (for the time) than you could easily be done by a computer.

Thing looks like I'm about to launch a rocket while at nasa