[a holck]

There has been much talk of using the RT FX and Offline RT
with a VGA card with s-video out, as it wont play out the firewire bus.

The basic idea is to buy a pci card w. s-video out like the radion, and maximize the canwas to fill the whole screen, and by that showing the fx un a video monitor.

It all seems to be missing facts, so Ill try to anwser some:

The s-video output of a vga card will not look good because:

- FCP is not decompressing the DV frames at normal quality in the canvas window, you can enable the full quality in the 'edit render qualitys...' pop up. If you do, massive frame dropping is occuring, even in FCP 2 without any fx overhead.
Therefore when keeping it off, the picture going to the card is VERY soft compared to the DV output.

- the RGB>YRB>YC conversion occouring in the card is if at its best NON STANDARD, therfore colorshifts can occur, gammashifts can accur, and worst of all you do not know how the onscreen levels are mapped to video(e.g. 0-255>0-255 or 16-235 like it should)

- Most cards offer resolutions in 640x480, 800x600 or 1024x768 in Squarepixels, not resembling a 1:1 relationship with DV PAL wich is 720x576 Non Square.

- Most boards doesn't support overscan so the picture will have black borders. Therefore you have no chance at judging positioning!

Keeping this in mind, my conclution is:

- For anything On-line: forget it!

- For offline editing, might be a usable tool if you can live with the screen positioning not being reliable.

RT effects and Offline RT wil be playing in realtime though!

[ 12-10-2001: Message edited by: a holck ]

[King Chung Huang]

Originally posted by a holck:
<STRONG>Because of the above points the video has to be scaled up to fit the canvas vindow on a lets say a 800x600 screen.
First of all the buttons and window borders in Canvas will to show up, making the video picture smaller, secondly most boards doesn't support overscan so the picture will have black borders. Therefore you have no chance at judging positioning!</STRONG>

In Final Cut Pro (all versions), you can use a second monitor as the target for "View External Video Using", in additional to the standard External FireWire NTSC/PAL, and Rendered Frames options. The suggestion to use the Radeon with video out isn't so that you can move your canvas to that monitor, but to treat the entire display as an output for FCP.

Even with this, I still wouldn't trust this setup for accurate levels or colors. I'll stick to my Matrox RTMac for that.