recommend low cost breakout box

[Richard Tamayo]

I just built a new editing pc. I am going to use Premiere pro CS5. I want to preview output to NTSC tv. What can I use to achieve this. I would like to keep cost down, meaning the least expencive way to do so.

Thanks!

[Adam Gold]

I use a small 1080i HDTV as my second monitor. Any video card that enables the full potential of CS5 and MPE GPU Hardware Acceleration will support full screen output to a second monitor.

Lots of threads on which cards to buy over in the Adobe section.

[Mike McCarthy]

You are trying to connect an NTSC TV, so I am assuming you are not editing in High Def. The cheapest solution would probably be an old DV camcorder attached via firewire, with analog output from there to your TV. In HD, conneccting a cheap 1080p LCD ($150) via HDMI is definitely the cheap way to go.

[Jay West]

There are several different ways to do this depending on what you want to achieve and what "low cost" means to you.

First thing, though, is to ask: why do you think you need a box?

As Adam points out, many newly built CS5 editing pc will have an MPE capable nVidia card which have dual display heads and some even have an HDMI-out port . If your card has an HDMI out, you just make that your second monitor and route your timeline/playback display to it. Nothing but an HDMI cable to buy. Otherwise, you can use one of the DVI to HDMI converter cables/dongles to feed a signal to your tv from a second DVI port. . That is about as low cost as it gets.

If you do not have a free display out port, then look at the Matrox MXO2 mini, which is an actual Break-Out-Box (BOB) . (A BOB can send video into as well as out of a computer.) The Mini requires a PCIe 1x slot (so you need an open PCIe slot in your new computer). If your Sony tv does not have hdmi, the Mini can feed an analog signal via component cables. The Mini definitely works with CS5 (I use one and can vouch for that).. However, at $449, this may or may not meet your definition of low cost. It is low only relative to things like AJA devices.

All of that is for working with HD. If you are only working with SD, then do as Mike suggested and keep using a firwire to camera to tv set-up.

[Kyle Root]

Here's a question: Take the GTX 560 Ti for example. It has two DVI and 1-mini HDMI connector. Is it possible to use all 3 outputs? The two DVI for a dual monitor set up and then the mHDMI to output a full resolution preview to a 3rd monitor?

[Adam Gold]

Usually, cards with three outputs can only use two at a time. If you Google the card you'll find some reviews and they all confirm this, to the extent this is mentioned. Not sure how accurate they are.

[Jay West]

Originally Posted by Kyle Root

Here's a question: Take the GTX 560 Ti for example. It has two DVI and 1-mini HDMI connector. Is it possible to use all 3 outputs? The two DVI for a dual monitor set up and then the mHDMI to output a full resolution preview to a 3rd monitor?

No. You will need an additional device to run three screens.


Richard:

Blackmagic Design has a four or five year-old PCIe card called the Intensity Pro which some resellers (such as B&H) still have in stock and available for $199. When I was looking at buying a unit a couple of years ago, I remember that some users liked it a lot and some had problems. There were a fair number of posts in DVinfo and the Adobe User Forums. (Sorry, but I no longer remember the content.) BMD might or might not have solved the problems since then. I vaguely recall reading something about BMD having updated the drivers to work with MPE acceleration under CS5. BMD has moved on to a new unit called the "Intensity Shuttle" which I think goes for about $189 . About all I know of the Shuttle is: (a) that the box can be run from either a PCIe card or a USB 3.0 port, depending on what you have available for the connection and (b) it only works with certain motherboards or chipsets. Do some searching to see what turns up.(Confusingly, there is another BMD product called simply the "Shuttle" -- this is a device to enable using solid-state-drives for tapeless recording from cameras. You want the to research the "Intensity Shuttle.")

[Bart Walczak]

We use Blackmagic Intensity Pro in one of our PCs, and it works quite well. There are some issues with BMD codecs, but once you find your way around them, it's a decent solution for this kind of money.