How to connect monitor to FCP?
 

I am thinking about purchasing a Panasonic LH1700 monitor from B&H, but I am confused on the best method to hook it up. My goal is to be able to edit and color correct HD on the external monitor. I was hoping to avoid using my camera for looping. Should I use an HD deck connected to firewire out or is there a black box (preferable) that will take firewire and output the HD or SD FCP canvas to the Panny monitor.How do you have yours hooked up? Thanks.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/cont...s=&ci=2199&ac=

I don't believe that any camera can give your realtime previews in HD over firewire. Of course you can use most cameras to give you realtime previews if editing SD DV though. I'm also not sure that there is any firewire device which can provide realtime previews... I think it's a limitation of FCP. I'm pretty sure you will need an internal HD card with monitor outputs that match your screen for this.

The other solution is using FCP's "digital cinema desktop" by plugging a second monitor into your computer (if it supports dual monitors) via DVI or VGA. This can be useful, but the images are not full quality unfortunately.

If you have an ADC flatpanel monitor now, your card should have a dvi port as well (or if you just have an extra DVI port), Apple makes a dvi > video (composite or s-video) adaptor that sells through their store for $20ish. You can then hook up a standard NTSC tv to the output as a second monitor. They also make a DVI > SVGA if you're so inclined.

Thanks guys. For HD it sounds like I would need an AJA card.

SD monitoring is really what I need right now. I have two DVI outs on my G5 and I could adapt one to s-video with an Apple cable, I think.

Would the quality of the SD video output be any better if I used a Canopus 110 A/D convering from firewire to s-video into the monitor?