Re: Previewing HD on second monitor
 

"PC yes, mac no. the hardware basically acts as a dongle."

Oh, joy. What a pain for Mac owners. Missed that because I'm using the Mini on a PC and didn't check the Mac software downloads before posting.

"the compress HD is $500. a mini max is $859 so its cheaper to get one with it built in. You also can put a PCie card into a laptop where you can use the speed boost the most."

All true if you also want the "Mini" for external monitoring display. Note that most of the folks posted in this thread want only to feed a second computer monitor on a PC rather than what the Mini excels at, which is feeding a third monitor or providing a YUV display. I got the Mini for running third screen monitoring from PPro and Avid MC5 timelines on a YUV display which, with the built-in screem calibration utility, allows me to do reasonably good color matching. (I do multi-cam event shoots with up to seven cameras some of which require matching in post). The color matching I do is good enough for my customers but I have no illusions that this would be suitable for the likes of PBS or theatrical releases.

For those who do very much H.264 encoding, the Max functions will be very useful. In my case, the Max functions go largely unused. My customers all still want DVDs. So far, I've only done BluRay versions for myself. I have yet to receive even an inquiry about putting video into the mobile formats that the Max functions offer. The few folks hereabouts who want mobile-device video seem to want only downloadable stuff from commercial sources and others.

Re: Previewing HD on second monitor
 

I'm generating h264 just about every day. the quality of the h264 encoding is really good, better then the slower software options :)... way better. DVD's have simply almost completely gone away. if I burn a DVD disc, its to put a really large h264 file on it, including stuff like HD TC burns for clients to log their shots. I get modest amounts of mobile, but huge amounts of web including often making 2 or 3 versions of everything. with this sort of volume the MAX encoder has become a critical part of gear for me.

Re: Previewing HD on second monitor
 

Just to say, thanks for the information on this thread. I have bought a 27 inch Samsung UE27D5000 HDTV as a playback monitor connected via the HDMI output of my graphics card, and have assigned it on the playback settings of my program monitor as recommended. The image quality is excellent, far superior to maximising the monitor window on the second monitor of a dual monitor system. I suspect many graphics cards will allow this. Mine is a ATI Radeon 5800 HD series card.

Editing is really sped up by the ability to see the edited segments in HD in real time.

Neil

Re: Previewing HD on second monitor
 

Always glad to hear from someone when things have gone well. Too many times (in other threads) you never hear back and wonder if they ever saw your answers.

Andrew

Re: Previewing HD on second monitor
 

Good to hear of your success. A couple of extra suggestions:

First, in Encore, you have playback settings similar to those in PPro. If you enable playback to the other card output, so you can display Encore timelines and disk previews to your HDTV as well. This may depend on your graphics display card, but I am able to do this on my system with an nVidia GTX260 graphics card as well as through my MXO2 mini.

Second, you mentioned "editing is really sped up . . ." If you are using CS 5 or 5.5 and have any money left in the equipment budget, you may want to replace the ATI 5800 card with a "CUDA" based nVidia card in order to get the very significant benefits of the hardware accelerated Mercury Playback Engine (MPE). When I checked a couple of weeks ago, the 1 gig nVidia GTS450 chipset cards (a basic CUDA/MPE card) were running between $110 and $120 ($US @ newegg.com), so not terribly expensive as cards go. I believe the GTS450 cards are roughly the same size as the ATI 5800 series PCIe cards, so they should fit in your case. To make a GTS450 work with CS5 and 5.5, you will have to add the card name to a text file. (This is the so called "hack" which is nothing more than typing an additional name into a plain text list.) Hardware MPE makes a big difference in playback of HD video from PPro timelines. In making this suggestion, I am assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that you are running a desktop editing computer and not a laptop with a mobile 5800 graphics card/chipset. Obviously, if you are using a laptop, this suggestion is not relevant to your situation.

Re: Previewing HD on second monitor
 

I am using CS5 on a desktop system. I had been under the impression that MPE compatible graphics cards were extremely expensive so good news that an affordable alternative is available. For my current projects, I probably don't need the MPE card as editing and scrubbing through the timeline seems very smooth on the current system. That may change depending on the complexity of future projects.

Also helpful to know about Encore previews, thanks for the information.

Neil

Re: Previewing HD on second monitor
 

Nvidia GTX580 graphics card has 2 x DVIs and 1 x HDMI.

Going from an ATI HD 4890 and CS4 to GTX580 and CS5, and requiring a third monitor the Nvidia card gave me this option rather than to get bogged down in Matrox solutions. I try to avoid add on hardware when it comes to Adobe.

:)

Re: Previewing HD on second monitor
 

Claire:

I did not know that the 580 could run 3 simultaneous displays. The previous models of nVidia cards would only allow 2 active outputs at a time (i.e., 2 DVI or 1 DVI with the HDMI).

Would you please provide more details. I am curious if this would work for me.

For instance, which 580 card are you using? How have you cabled to the screens and what kinds of screens are you using? (Are you running 2 computer monitors from DVI and an HDTV off an HDMI port? Three computer monitors?)

Are you spanning your computer desktop across the three screens or are you feeding separate displays to each or, maybe, spanning across two screens and using the third as your timeline monitor? I am asking because I do a lot of multi-cam work and find it useful to have my main editing screen in front of me, the 4-way multi-cam window displayed full screen on a second monitor on one side and, on the other side, a full screen timeline playback monitor with an HDTV showing a YUV display of the edit. I have been looking at a video card upgrade and am curious if I can do this without an MXO2 mini.

Do you calibrate the monitors? If so, what do you use for calibration?