External Monitor Options???

[Vince Becquiot]

I didn’t know they made i7 notebooks yet, that must be one hot poppy 🙂

As for your question, you do have those 2 options:

Firewire through a D/A converter or compatible camcorder/ camera will get you to an NTSC monitor. How are you routing the firewire, and through what unit?

The second option is, as you said, through HDMI.
Set the external monitor as extended first in your display properties, then you will see it in the external playback properties in Premiere, it will only display the program monitor output.

The resolution should also be set properly in Vista / XP or things will stretch. If this is a 16:10 computer monitor, set it to either 1280×768 (for 720p), or 1920×1200 (for 1080p), if the monitor supports it.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Jeff Brown]

What kinds of projects are you editing [project settings]? — I think you need to be editing a DV project for DV preview out.

-jeff

[Mark Hollis]

Buck, on my copy of Premiere Pro, there is a little circle with a triangle on the Monitor display on the “record” side. Click or that and you will get a menu that includes Playback Settings. This is also how you can get Premiere Pro to display a waveform or vector, which, if you open a reference monitor you can gang with your timeline. I don’t like color correction or level correction without scopes.

Anyway, you can select Firewire as the device to play on and if your notebook has a firewire port, you can hook that up to a VCR and take the video and audio out of that VCR for an external monitor. Some cameras will let you do that (hook up to an external monitor), as well.

Additionally, for those who do not have VCRs lying around or whose cameras don’t do monitor playback, I currently use a TVOne DV-1394 Pro SDI Signal converter that works very well. It will convert into SDI, balanced and unbalanced audio, regular video and Y/C video from firewire.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Brian Louis]

I decided to use the Matrox’s MX02 mini box with my laptop, I wanted the verisatility of monitor options, I can use the MX’s HDMI or component, composite out for a external video monitor and use the extra video card outputs for second monitors, plus the HDMI in and assorted analog inputs for live cam capture, I haven’t fully explored the capabilities yet as I am finishing up some HDV projects, but I like the 3 monitor setup, using a extra computer monitor I can use the dynamic link and have both apps displayed, like Ppro on one and AFX or Encore on the other plus use the WSTV for playback.

[Buck Wyckoff]

Thanks for the response Vince.
Yes that Sager is one snappy puppy. It’s quad-core i7-975 3.33GHz, 366MHz system bus to boot. I ordered it fro John Peterson at Renderstream. Great folks!

Anyway, I have a firewire port built into the Sager hooked up to a Sony M25U deck. The deck has an LCD screen built in so if Premier was sending a signal out that port, I’d see it on the LCD screen.

The Sager responds when I connect a device to that port and I’ve digitized footage fine through it. The device (I assume it is that device) shows put in the Adobe Playback Settings Exteranl list as DV 29.97 720x480i.

The other thing you mentioned worked GREAT!!! I have the Sager DVI output extended and set to 1600×1200 for SD work and it shows up in the Premier External list and works fine.

Adobe help only mentions external monitoring through firewire and I didn’t realize I could enable more options by configuring other devices within the system.

Thanks again.

I’ve contacted Sager support as I fear their firewire device has a glitch. No bi-directionality, or something.

[Buck Wyckoff]

I had Premier set up for a DV project and had digitized footage from the same deck and firewire connection that I was then trying to monitor on.

Okay, I lied….I digitized the footage in Windows Movie Maker. Now before ya’ll hoist be by the nards, I did that because a client wants to send me 26 hours of DV footage on an exteranl USB drive and when I asked them how they did it, that was their response.

So I wanted to simulate that as a test in my studio. It works pretty well actually. You can tell it to automatically digitize an entire tape and it controls the deck and creates an AVI wrapper around the DV format.

The only other option is WMV and with that option you can choose one file or multiple files based on scene changes. I wish the AVI version did scene change clips.

Anyway that’s the scoop Jeff. You can find out more in my responses to other posts to this thread.

[Buck Wyckoff]

Thanks Mark,
I need to learn my scopes as LCD’s are not to be trusted.

As I had mentioned, my firewire output does not work. I’ve contacted Sager about that. Monitoring through the laptop DVI port works great though. Something I picked up elsewhere on this thread.

[Buck Wyckoff]

Brian,
Thanks for the response. I have looked at the MX02 mini and it seems like a great option for laptop work. The PCMIA interface card seems like a good interface option for me….especially if my laptop’s firewire port is questionable for output. I also like their Mpeg I-Frame codec. And another plus is the Matrox MAX feature for accelerated encoding of some formats. They say PC support will come in late Septembor 2009, but there it nothing listed as of yet.

The Blackmagic Design MultiBridge seems like a great product, but it is desktop only.

The MOTU V4HD looks AWESOME!!!! It works with Premier Pro CS4. Not sure if it can aid encoding. My worry about it is I am still not sure my firewire connection is bi-directionally functional and it is a firewire interface. A firewire 800 PCMIA card for my laptop and that device might be really tasty.

But I think I may get the MX02. I’m just getting up to speed with CS4 etc…, and I can get crazy later. I like the workflow you mentioned; two CS4 apps opened full screen on two monitors and a third program output via MX02. Sounds sweet.

[Mark Hollis]

Can you do an Export to Tape? If you can, you should be able to set your system up, through a VCR, to a monitor as I described. You should know I’m using Premiere Pro 1.5 and not CS3 or CS4 (which is what most people here are using) but I cannot imagine that Adobe would have changed monitoring options much.

If you cannot output to tape, you have a fairly serious problem with your computer (but then, one wonders if you would be able to import from tape if you could not output to tape).

I don’t particularly like the idea of using another computer monitor output to monitor video. Computer monitors are notorious for not giving you a good idea of what your video will look like on a real television once you’re all done with it, as their gamuts are not the same and there is a tendency for you to see your work as if it were always progressive (even though your final output may be interlaced).

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

[Buck Wyckoff]

That’s a good question and a scary thought. If I can’t monitor through firewire, you’d think I couldn’t print to tape. Then how an I going to archive my projects?

But something doesn’t add up here. I digitized from tape and Windows Movie Maker controlled the Sony M25U through firewire. To do that it must have had bi-directional communication to pull that off.

With my Leitch Velocity system I currently have a 55″ LCD and a Sony broadcast monitor CRT hooked up. I do not feel comfortable without the CRT. I’ve been editing this way (without the LCD) for 11 years. Clients are only looking at things on LCDs anymore and commenly saying the color is off.

At any rate, I have to try other hardware, programs etc… and nail down where the problem is. Just the fact that other people say it works let’s me know it should work.

Thanks.