Small TV as monitor
 

I am using a small TV as my monitor via Sony HVR-M15U deck when editing. Signal passes from PC (PPro 2.0) to deck to small TV. I would like to remove the deck and go straight from my PC video card to my small TV to do my editing. What card do I need? My video cards (SLI dual cards) have a cable that adapts to the RGB and S-Video cables, but when I connect the S-video cable to the small TV direct...no picture.

What kind of card do I need to connect directly to a TV?

IIRC televisions don't take s-video directly, that's a vcr thing. The MR15u can take either s video or composite analog; some tv's can accept a composite signal (yellow rca plug is video, white and red are audio, if they are on your set). If you card outputs component video you are all set, if not you may need an "rf adapter" which converts the component video to a radio-frequency signal that you can feed into the antenna connections on the tv, this are cheap at Radio Shack, usually used to hook the old-fashioned video games up to a tv or a dvd player to a tv without video-level inputs...I wonder if you can feed s-video into the mr15u and take component out of the component-out jacks, just using it as a converter?

Battle Vaughan/miamiherald.com video team

Another option...
 

Since you're already using 1394 to send your signal through your cam, you could replace your cam with a Panasonic standalone DVD recorder. It has a 1394 input and will simultaneously output the signal via composite, S-video and component. Surely your TV supports at least one of those inputs.

I have two of these units and they're great. They provide the added benefit of letting you bump a quick dub of your timeline to DVD without going through the time and effort of authoring and transcoding.

When I bought mine, two years ago, they were about US$300 or less. You might be able to get one cheap at the Circuit City liquidation if there's one near you.

[QUOTE=Battle Vaughan;996139]IIRC televisions don't take s-video directly, that's a vcr thing. The MR15u can take either s video or composite analog; some tv's can accept a composite signal (yellow rca plug is video, white and red are audio, if they are on your set). If you card outputs component video you are all set, if not you may need an "rf adapter" which converts the component video to a radio-frequency signal that you can feed into the antenna connections on the tv, this are cheap at Radio Shack, usually used to hook the old-fashioned video games up to a tv or a dvd player to a tv without video-level inputs...I wonder if you can feed s-video into the mr15u and take component out of the component-out jacks, just using it as a converter?

Thanks Battle...My card has component outputs. I had connected it to the TV years ago, but something was way off...color I think...I'll try it again. The goal is to get rid of the Sony deck.

Tripp - good idea....I'll definitely check into that...

Tripp - On your TV monitor do you get ONLY a picture of your source monitor? Only the video portion of your editing software?

Going straight from my video card to the TV with a S-video works but show the same screen as my LCD monitor, which is the full editing interface.

Tripp - I am using a standalone DVD recorder with 1394 and my computer see the hardware but needs the software "cannot install this hardware". Do you know a way around this? No software was provided with the DVD recorder.

Bill... Oops. I was extrapolating my experience with these DVD recorders into this application. I've not actually connected my system up this way. I didn't consider that the system needed software or drivers that probably don't exist. Sorry about that.

This might work if we can fake out the computer to think that the DVD recorder is something else like a DV camcorder. Perhaps manually installing a camcorder driver on the computer for the DVD recorder would at least get the DV video stream pouring down the 1394 cable. We'll have to figure out where those drivers might live and what they are called before we can get them installed.

You should get a 720x480 image of your video only on the TV monitor. I'm not sure if there's any way to change this with PP but I think not.

I did not mean to send you off in pursuit of the untamed ornathoid with this. I thought you should be able to do this. But then I also think you should be able to monitor HDV video via 1394 but we all know that can't happen.