Which Graphics Card for 3D in Premiere CS5?
 

Folks

I've been impressed with what I've seen in the videos at this link:-

Premiere Pro CS5 Stereoscopic 3D Video Editing with Dave Helmley - 3D Vision Blog

The videos are really long and boring, but the nuts and bolts is that with Cineform Neo and CS5 he's got a dual monitor setup where you can see live 3D on a second monitor while editing. This is what we call "the holy grail".

However, I have no clue what kind of graphics card you need to do this. I guess it's dual output, but does it have to be a fancy one like a Quadro? My 3D sync emitter needs a signal it gets from a 3 pin mini DIN connector. If I switch to the nVidia 3D Vision glasses and emitter how does that get its sync?

Any help, as always, greatfully received...

/ben

All you need is a decent mid to high end graphics card with dual head output. For best flexibility and performance with 2D editing a CUDA and Mercury engine compatible NVIDIA graphics card is your best bet. These will almost certainly have dual head output. I use this setup with Cineform Neo feeding a 2D monitor for the timeline and bins etc and then I feed the second output to a Zalman M215W polarised 3D monitor.

I have a 1Gb NVIDIA GT285 in my MacPro and this works well. The same card also works in PC's and is an entry level card for Mercury engine real time performance

3d editing is still at early stage, so you better will take a cheap card, while a real solution (i mean matched hardware and software) emerge.
Currently there are 2 ways.
first, you can rely on hardware and use a high end nvidia card with quad buffering.
The drawback of this (except huge price) is you never know if your editing software will really support it.
2nd , you can go the software way, by using some plugin that convert picture to any valid 3d format (side to side, interlaced) and use regular 3d screen (a real 3D TV like the cheap samsung)
the advantage is you can use it to display 3D from other support like blu-ray, have a larger audience, and make sure what you see is what you get.
a intermediate solution is to use the Zalman monitor, but it is a middle way solution, since the way it displays 3D is not the one adopted in 3D TV, and you cannot use the screen elsewhere than on a PC for 3D display (it requires a special software player while you can build a video file that is compatible without the player.)
Personally i think the futur is for plugins that simply display a side to side video trough HDMI, so you can connect your cheap 3D TV set to the computer.
currently i use a cheap nvidia GeForce8500 (about 60$) with Zalman 3D monitor.