Using a Behringer BCF2000 with Lightroom 5.6 and Paddy

Using a Behringer BCF2000 with Lightroom 5.6 and Paddy

As a commercial photographer time is money, so anything that can speed up processing is a win for me. I’d hear people raving about how good a midi slider/fader was at helping with lightroom processing. Now most of the people I’d spoken to were using pfixer on Mac which is pretty much plug and play. Of course PC’s were always the choice of serious music people back in the day so I assumed it would be even easier to get this working on Windows and Lightroom.

How does it speed things up?

How does a midi slider make things faster I hear you say? Probably just after “What is a midi slider” I suspect. Basically rather than move the mouse to make changes for your images functions are mapped directly to the midi controls meaning you can change things more quickly and easily than normal.
Here’s what the BCF 2000 looks like.

Now you can change any key to map to anything but what I have is a the sliders mapped to exposure, contract, clarity, vibrance, highlights, whites, blacks, temperature. This can be changed of course and the top buttons are presets and image rotation too. Then I have the buttons at the bottom to take me backwards and forwards between images. Definitely time saved!

Does it work out of the box?

The answer is kinda.. when I plugged mine in via the usb cable the driver gets loaded and recognized as the BCF2000. This is pretty good you’d think, however what you find is that the mapping of the controls is a bit poor, and when you try and setup a different mapping you get the dreaded Err22.. which basically means it’s not gonna work. So time for some internet research.. of course all the information out there is for Lightroom 3 and Lightroom 4, with no mention of Lightroom 5 at all.. so you think… have I wasted my money.. the answer (with windows 7 at least) is no!

OK clever clogs how to I get it to work?

Well the first thing to realise is that the drivers need changing. Despite having the correct name you need the specific midi drivers from Behringer… in the case of windows 7.. it’s the 64 bit drivers. Of course they are not on the BCF2000 page.. only on the the BCR2000 (the same one but with dials instead of sliders). So download those first from the Behringer Website HERE, go to downloads and download the 64 bit drivers, unzip and run the installer, making sure that these drivers are associate with the BCF2000 instead of the ones that default to it.

Once this driver is installed you’re on the home straight.

OK which version of the 3 million versions of PADDY do I need to get?

Again there are so many versions around it’s not simple to know which ones to use. I grabbed the latest beta from the sourceforge place here -> Paddy or the ZIPFILE. Also worth taking a look on the blogspot area for Paddy.

Right I’ve got all that installed what next?

Once you have the drivers and Paddy installed (Unzip to the modules directory) and verified its working in the plugin manager you need to make a few settings changes to ensure it works correctly. Here are some screen grabs for you to make sure you’ve installed the right drivers and then set the right things in Paddy Settings.

verify the drivers on windows 7

verify the drivers on windows 7

make sure you have it setup to use BCF2000 Midi sliders in the paddy preferences panel

make sure you midi in and out is also set on the assign->behringer panel too

You can then get to work mapping any changes you want to make via plugin-manager->extras->assign->behringer midi controller and you’ll see a little mini version the controller, simply program each key to what you want. Then remember what you’ve mapped and write the current preset 🙂

Can I see it in action?

Sure I made a quick and dirty video of me using the BCF2000 with Lightroom 5.6 on Windows 7 (not tried it on anything else as of yet – but will be going to windows 8.1 soon so will update this article if there are any changes/issues).