[Tim Allison]“But what is the cheapest way to set up HD reference monitoring?”
There’s always the option of AJA’s HDP converter or the Blackmagic HDLink coupled with with an HD-resolution LCD. Not really suited for color correction, but the price is nice and you’ll get full-raster 1080, something you won’t get with a CRT or even the Panasonic BT-LH series monitors.
If you have access to Cinema 4D and some time to become familiar with it, the MoGraph module is a powerful tool for instancing objects in 3D space. Plus, Cinema 4D nicely exports to an AE comp!
You don’t need to learn the application in-depth to get some use out of MoGraph. The Cow has a few tutorials too, I believe.