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Old May 9th, 2005, 01:50 PM   #2
Barry Green
Barry Wan Kenobi
 
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: North Carolina
Posts: 3,525
They're designed for two very different purposes, and, indeed, will give two very different looks, but not for the reasons you might suspect.

DV Rack does have an HD monitor module if you get the new "HDV PowerPack" upgrade. However, at today's computer processing speeds, you're not going to get full realtime display. At NAB it looked a little posterized, like maybe 15fps or so (but maybe the DV Rack guys will weigh in with exact numbers). As computers get faster that performance will increase, and eventually provide full realtime refresh rates.

A dedicated monitor will always show full realtime refresh rates. However, here's the kicker: with HDV, a monitor won't show you what your footage actually looks like! The new breed of affordable HD and HDV cameras all have uncompressed video output, so a live monitor hooked up to the component outputs will show you an HD image, but it won't show you what the post-compression footage actually looks like. This is especially important for HDV, with the potential for significant motion artifacts -- if you use a conventional monitor, you won't know whether your footage is artifacting or not. You can't see it in the LCD, and you can't see it on the monitor.

Where you *can* see it, is in the DV Rack monitor. DV Rack takes the footage after compression, so any compression artifacts, motion artifacts, etc. will be displayed on the DV Rack monitor.

DV Rack of course has many other pluses to it, such as the waveform, vectorscope, audio monitors and the direct-to-disk recorder. All of that combined make it a must-buy. But for monitoring, I think it's even more important for HDV users than it was for DV users... however, keep in mind that it doesn't give you full refresh rates on today's processors, so... it's not really a direct substitute for a genuine HD monitor.

For a fully professional shooting environment, you'd want both.
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