Dual screen Vegas
 

Im running Vegas 7, hopefully 8 soon.

How best should I have a dual screen setup?

Any advice or screen grabs/photos would be much appreciated

If this is what you're asking then...I've always run my TL and work space on 1 screen and my preview screen on the 2nd screen. For production monitor view I use a pass thru and of course when viewing that it kills the 2nd monitor.

Don

In both 7, and now 8, I run editor on a 20 Dell Wide LC. My Windows Desk top is configured to extend desk top to my second monitor, which is actually a 32inch Magnovox HD LCD, that I feed through DVI to HDMI convertor to the HD LCD.

When I want to preview in full, I can press the extend preview to monitor button, and Vegas will send it to the 32inch LCD to preview, and still show preview in small monitor window on Vegas itself.

Similar to Don, except I run the preview in a window on the second screen so a) it doesn't disappear when passing through f/w to the production monitor and b) I also drag pan/crop and track motion windows there. Believe me, if I could have four screens, I would.

BIIIIIIG screenshot attached!

Ian . . .

Right now, as we are working on a 720P project, I have the timeline and several windows on one monitor (both 22" 1680 x 1050 Samsungs) and on the other monitor we have preview displayed at 1280 x 720, leaving room for histogram and RGB parade and the like. This lets us view the footage in it native resolution to keep a close eye on focus.

Thanks for the replies.

How does a 3 monitor setup work then? Dual GFX card and a seperate one? Whats the pass through you mentioned?

At present I have 2 20" tft's running from a dual gfx card... how would I go about adding a third monitor? Add another card?

Tim,

Yeah, two graphics cards is the way (which conceivably could give you up to four displays!). I think there is also at least one three head card on the market (Matrox?)

Although I am tempted, and could certainly make use of the extra screen real estate, the trouble with going bigger than two screens might be that your mouse has to travel further and further to get where you want it to be. Even on two screens I slip off the mousemat quite often (and no, I don't want to change my mouse speed settings!).

Pass-through is when you pass the signal out of (in this case) Vegas, via a firewire connection, through a digital-to-analogue converter (such as the DAC-200 in my case) or a DV camera and then into a production monitor or TV screen. This will give you a true(er)* represenentation of what your project will look like on a TV. Probably pointless if your work is only destined for a PC screen but essential otherwise.

* I say 'true-er' because if your production monitor isn't calibrated correctly it will not be a true representation of colour. Also, if your output goes to a regular domestic TV screen it will show you how THAT TV will display it, which may be very different to other TVs. A quick wander around Curry's TV department will demonstrate how manufacturers sweeten their displays in different ways.