In a nutshell: Its 3 trackballs, 3 dials, 2 reset buttons per dial/ball, 2 extra buttons A and B, it costs arround 370EUR and connects via USB.

The housing is made of (cheap) plastic and so it makes some noise when moving the balls, but the trackballs and dials are quite nice. I think its "ok" for the price.

I'm using it with Davinci Resolve and the setup is quite easy (less than 5min): download the Tangent hub software, install it, connect the Ripple, start Resolve, select Tangent Elements Panel (the Ripple simulates the Element TK), have fun.

The balls/dials controll the left 3 colour wheels/bars of the Colour page (I have not figured out how to controll the right most wheel/bar). The left reset buttons reset the respective colour wheel, the right buttons reset the respective colour wheels and luminance. Extra button B toggles "bypass all grades" on/off and I have no idea what the A button does.

I have not used the panel for serious grading so far, but from some quick testing I can say:

• The panel sits very stable on its four rubber feet..

• Its nice to be able to controll 2 or 3 colour wheels at once - much better than one by one.

• The trackballs are nice, heavy and feel good, but I have to adjust the sensetivity (if thats possible) as small changes are a bit imprecise.

• Its much better than using the mouse for the colour wheels... MUCH BETTER! (Thats the reason why I bought the Ripple.)

• I wish the B button would only bypass the current node, not all nodes. I have not found any way to reassign the A and B buttons to other functions (but maybe its possible).

• The right trackball sometimes does not move equally smooth in all directions - it seems one of the small support balls under the trackball gets stuck. Maybe this is only with my panel? (If you have a Ripple, please let me know if its the same on yours.)

Some tipps:

• Take the trackballs out of the housing if you want to pick up the panel and carry it arround! They are not enclosed by the housing and easily fall out (they are heavy!).

• If the panel wobbles on a flat surface, relocate the USB cable - it doesn't like to stay in its groove.

As you can see in the pictures, I'm going to use the Ripple (3 trackballs) with a Midifighter Twister (16 programmable rotary encoders) and an Icon Istage (lots of buttons) for my colour grading setup. The Ripple does work out of the box. The Twister works really nice with Controllermate and I'm nearly finished with the program to control a lot of functions in Resolve with it. The Istage might be replaced soon, as the hardware is quite nice for the low price, but the software/firmware is total crap... really, its the worst I have ever seen. I will try a Korg Nanopad2 soon, hopefully this will work better.

Enjoy!

And what else can be said about the GH3? I've never had such a better time color grading footage. So glad I brought this camera over the GH2

Camera: GH3, natural, -5 -5 0 -5, 200 iso for everything minus the couple night time scenes (never went above 800 IIRC), used the EM5 for couple of scenes (Thank god for that stabilization!) Lenses: 12mm olympus f2, 75mm olympus f1.8, 25mm Voigtlander f0.95, and 35mm SlrMagic

Comments welcomed.