Multiple Monitors
 

I am planning on buying a new computer and I have a few questions about multiple monitors. What hardware do you need to support multiple monitors?
I was planning on getting a Radeon 9800
pro graphics card but I read that Matrox Parhelia might be better.
Also, does all video editing software work with multiple monitors? For example Vegas Video.
I am new to all this so any advice would be very much appreciated.

For multilpe monitors the Parhelia would be the best. These cards are designed specifically for digital content production using multiple monitors. The Radeon cards are excellent cards but are more for gaming and 3D graphics. Both are excellent chioces but I personally prefer the Matrox products for multiple monitor work.

All NLE applications work very well with multiple monitors. I'm currently using Premiere, Vegas and AVID with dual 19"CRT monitors and it is much better, and more cost effictive, than a single 21".

The Parhelia supports certain combinations of 3 monitors. It doesn't do 3XDVI and other combinations of DVI, VGA, and TV-out. If you want 3d acceleration across 3 monitors or easy triplehead, then the Parhelia is the way to go.

You can try to get 3 monitors with 2 video cards (1 AGP, 1 using PCI) but that takes some work. The ultramon website has info on how to get setup with that.

If you just want dual monitors, 1 DVI/VGA and the other VGA than most ATI/Nvidia cards will work. If you want 2XDVI, then only certain ATI/Nvidia cards will do that (i.e. gainward and Asus Geforce 5600s) and the Matrox P650, and workstation 3d cards (which cost a lot). ATI/Nvidia cards have much better 3d acceleration than Matrox cards. 3d acceleration is handy for After Effects and Edition. And of course games. :)

For dual monitor setups, Nvidia is slightly better than ATI from what I hear. With ATI cards you can't have 2 taskbars (something like that).

I'm not sure what makes Matrox video cards better for video editing. They do dual monitors, but now ATI and Nvidia have caught up. The Parhelia does three monitors, but not everyone needs that. They have some color accuracy features, but you really need a NTSC monitor to check color accuracy. DV.com has a review where the reviewer calibrates a CRT monitor to be close to a NTSC monitor, which might be useful. Maybe you can do that on NVidia cards too (they have video overlays too).