If you haven't already, extend your desktop to the TV monitor in your desktop settings (if you need help with this, ask) Once you have a second desktop, you should be able to undock your video preview window and drag it to the second desktop - where you should be able to maximize the window and it will take up the full screen.

Please note - this is theory, but it works that way in other programs (winamp, media player, etc.) so it should work in Vegas.

I'd appreciate some clarification. I too am looking for information on hanging a standard video monitor off my PC to preview Vegas output.

In my case I have an NVidia 128 MB DDR GeForce FX with S-Video out. But, I've understood that is really just so you can output the computer video to an NTSC monitor. I'm not sure that is really equivalent to what would be seen in a real world situation. Is it? I'm looking for things like a match for the gamma I would expect on a standard TV.

For anyone using an external monitor (BTW, I'm running Windows XP Pro) are you using the built-in second desktop or do you need to use some sort of external device?

Thanks!

Wayne

I do both.
I have two monitors off the video card. They are setup as a horizaontal span so the desktop is two monitors wide. I then start VV, size it to fit the LH monitor nd then drag the preview monitor over to the RH half of the desktop and enlarge it fill the screen.

I also have my camera connected to the 1394 port and its analogue ouputs drive a TV monitor. This means I can see how the video looks on a TV but at the same time switch back to internal preview if I'm woriking on graphics. Alternatively I might drag an fx window over to the RH pane to give me more room to work.

Do you find that the RH video monitor is a pretty accurate indication of what you see on the monitor hung off the camera? Just wondering what you find most valuable about the monitor hung off the camera. I've never messed with a dual monitor setup since the physical space to place the monitors has always been limited. This new card has S-Video (and I don't even have a small monitor that takes S-Video in) and the DVI out. What I might do for the dedicated Preview monitor is use an adapter cable I have that allows me to put the DVI signal into a standard VGA input.

When you Preview full screen do you get continuous output, meaning do you see most if not all frames. I'm moving to a new system, but my existing 1 GHz system would give hesitant output on all but the smaller preview sizes. I did have everything defragged on that Windows 2000 machine with 512 MB, but this particular project was moderately complex. Two cameras each of which needed Curves applied and Color Correction for a match (but it did turn out beautiful :-) and other video tracks of digital stills with Pan and Crop applied and a minimum of four tracks of audio.

I'm hoping the new 2.6 GHz P4 machine will get me closer to real time preview. This box has the 800 MHz front-end bus with hyper-threading, but I think I heard that Vegas doesn't yet support HT.

Thanks for sharing what your doing. Any suggestions appreciated.

The external monitor is very handy for checking what it looks like when the signal is fed through composite video. What can look good on a RGB monitor can fall apart on a TV. Straight video isn't so much of an issue for me but with graphics and text you need to be careful.