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Final Cut Pro and Plasma Screens
To start, our system is a G5 Dual 2.0 with 2.5gig of RAM and a Decklink HD card running final Cut 5 on a 23″ HD Cinema. We’re using it to edit 1080i and 1080/24p footage, and all is working great. We use the HD Cinema in Preview mode to show clients, and it works really well.
However, we do have a Fujitsu Plasmavision 50″ Plasma screen currently doing nothing. It has a DVI-D input on it, and we were wondering if we could use THIS as the client monitor for our Final Cut steup by running it straight out of the G5 (using an ADC to DVI converter.) The reason I ask is because I remember hearing once that you don’t want to hook plasmas up to a computer, as the signals aren’t the same, and you can damage the plasma. I do not remember where I heard this. I do not remember if I actually did here this. Basically, I have a red flag in my head about Plasmas and Computers via DVI-D. Am I nuts? Am I correct? I’d like to not have to learn this lesson the hard way.
And, say it does work. The screen’s resolution is ~1344×768, definitely not native 1080i, and not even native 720p. However, when we have viewed both signal types on the screen, we’ve been pleased with the results. Definitely good enough for client review. But, can we use Final Cut Pro and the Plasma in this manner? Is it possible to set up Final Cut to use this second screen as a Client display monitor? How would one do this?
Thanks in advance for the help.
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1 Reply
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The signal will not damage your plasma. Static images will. Be careful. Personally, I’d recommend not doing it. I went to a place that did this and their $8000 plasma was ruined because the company’s slate was permanantly burned into the screen.
If the plasma only accepts video signals, then you’ll need an SDI I/O device and the HDLink from Blackmagic Design or a similar product. But this is unheard of in my experience. Every plasma I’ve seen also accepts VESA standard computer signals. If that’s the case, then it will act just like a computer monitor and internally scale it to whatever the native resolution is. So you can most likely use the Desktop Cinema View mode. But this mode has limitations. It’s not good for critical viewing and if the material has 3:2 applied to it, it won’t deinterlace properly and will definately annoy clients. I’d get the HDLink if you can.
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