Loupedeck discontinued - now what?
Recently Logitech announced that they are killing the entire line of Loupedeck products. That means no more sales of new units, and no more development plans.
What does this mean for anyone who already has a Loupedeck CT, and how does this affect users of this profile?
No More Sales of New Units
Firstly, this is a major bummer because there are still many Final Cut Pro editors out there who haven't yet taken the leap to editing with a hardware console. You'll still be able to find used Loupedeck CTs on ebay for sure, but no more new sales is a big blow to the whole Loupedeck CT and CommandPost community.
When Logitech acquired Loupedeck, there was always a suspicion that they would rebrand it, or fold it under their own products, or possibly even go after a different market than us creative professionals. But to completely kill the product line is real sad.
The announcement does state that Logitech will continue to offer support for Loupedeck products, including both warranty claims and technical support.
What about the Loupedeck app?
The official Loupedeck app has had some wild drama over the past few months, as they launched a 6.0 version which flat out didn't work. Many users went back to version 5.9, until Logitech came out with another update.
Today there is still debate whether the official app still works like it did before, or possibly better? (Probably not). But for users of this profile, you'll know we don't use the official app anyway.
Keep Loupedeck app installed anyway
The most important thing is to keep your Loupedeck app installed on your machine, even though you don't need it for the CommandPost app, which works directly with the Loupedeck CT.
Why? I recently went through a number of test scenarios and found that I could successfully uninstall the Loupedeck app and continue to run CommandPost just fine. However, when I uninstalled CommandPost and re-installed it, my Loupedeck CT kept showing its old Loupedeck app icons, even though the app wasn't installed on my machine. I re-installed the app, closed it, and continued to run CommandPost as before.
CommandPost continues to keep Loupedeck alive
The news of Loupedeck shutting down really sucks, but I'm so thankful for the CommandPost developers for having the vision to create this app that completely takes over the Loupedeck CT. The developers are part of the filmmaking / editing community, and they have been regularly updating the CommandPost app as there are enhancement requests and bug reports.
My recommendation is to keep the Loupedeck app installed for now, even though we don't need it for running CommandPost. But hopefully with CommandPost we'll be able to keep using our CT forever.
