Frustated second monitor user AARRGGHH !!!

sqblz wrote on 1/13/2003, 5:56 AM

Folks, it took me more than one month until I decided to post this, but ... I must confess that I am ultimately frustated with a simple problem, and it makes me MAD (seeing red...).
So, maybe there's someone out there comiserating enough to help me ... please ...

Problem is so simple ... I only want to have a TV besides my monitor, so that I can have the preview window filling the TV screen, and the remaining Vegas stuff filling the monitor. I know that everybody out there is doing this, so WHY not me ???

My stuff: Graphics card is a Geforce 4 MX440 with TV out (composite, RCA). Brand is Leadtek Winfast.
Monitor is IBM 19" working at 1280x960 85Hz. TV will be simple PAL with composite RCA video in.
I have latest Detonator drivers installed (v41.09) and Win98 SE2 with DirectX v9.0 and MS Windows Player v9.0 (not betas). Vegas works like a dream ...

My problem is: no matter what I do, the image I get on the TV is alway BAD: very low definition, very murky colors and wrong size (I don't even see the whole desktop on the TV, only the center of it).

I know that the Geforce4 is picky dealing with the TV out (like having to reboot to recognize the connection, and so on) but this is too much !!! I am not even able to deploy a simple sequence of steps that gives me a connection. Sometimes I see it, sometimes I don't ... I have gone all over the Nvidia settings screens (and also the NView utility), but did not succeed. I have even read the Nvidia Manual, for Peter's sake !!!

Also, strange as it may be, TVTool v6.8.2 (and before) does not recognize my GeForce4 chipset, so there's no way out there either ...

AAARRRGGGHHH !!!

Before I give up in despair, will somebody out there gives me the Fool's Guide to TvOut ? Something that works with YOU. I guess PAL or NTSC doesn't matter, what matters is the approach to the problem.

Thanks deeply.

Comments

Grazie wrote on 1/13/2003, 6:52 AM

Okay Sqbiz - apologies first if you know this, but here I go:

1 - You can use the External Monitor option to get high quality Preview onto a TV, but this is done through firewire AND using an DV to Av convertor. You must also set the Preview quality to BEST - something I often forget.

2 - However, on re-reading your post, I'm presuming you are using S-Video out as a second monitor feed. Is that correct? If this is the case and you have set-up your TV as a secondary monitor through MS Settings>Display etc etc , then I agree with you, I haven't been pleased with the results.

When VV allows me/you/us to view high quality on an External monitor it is by this first method.

How one can achieve a better result through option 2 - I too would be interested.

As I said, apologies if you knew this already,

We'll get there,

Grazie

sqblz wrote on 1/13/2003, 10:27 AM

Thanks, Marquat.
I can't use SVideo. My Graphics Board TVout is RCA only, which means composite.
I am using 640x480 as TV settings within Display-Properties.

Thanks, Grazie.
The only DV/AV convertor that I have is the passthrough of my DV camera (which works, I have recorded some VHS tapes in the past, using this).
But this is not what I was trying. I just want to *plainly* use the TVOut "facility" of my graphics board.
As you know, the TVOut Mgr seems to be able to display different parts of an application in each screen, and I wanted to put that in practice for Vegas.
(I could as well watch AVI's in my 36" TV, but that's out of scope in this thread).
Your 2nd item is discouraging. It seems that the TVout signal is intrinsically BAD, which is a shame. If bad, then why care to include it in the first place ?
Do you mean that TVout is useless and I must go back to passthrough DV/AV to have a decent External Monitor preview ?

Much obliged by your opinions. Anyone else wishing/caring to comment ?
Thanks.

musicvid10 wrote on 1/13/2003, 10:34 AM

sqblz,
The problem is that the Vegas preview window does not output an Overlay signal, which is what our Geforce cards support for full screen, high resolution output to TV.

The solutions are:
1) Firewire 1394 interface as Grazie describes, or
2) Using the "Preview in Player" option to selectively render portions of your project in a format that WILL output full screen Overlay through your Geforce, and give quite a nice picture on your TV.

Method number (2) takes a bit of time for render depending on your CPU speed, however I have devised a very quick render method using Huffyuv (on Win98SE) that I use constantly to preview project segments with my transitions, effects, compositing, etc. I'll be glad to share it with you if you like.
Best of luck,
Mark

Tyler.Durden wrote on 1/13/2003, 10:35 AM

Hi Sqblz,

>>>>Do you mean that TVout is useless and I must go back to passthrough DV/AV to have a decent External Monitor preview ?<<<<

What you see may not be what you get...

There might be a problem using it to assess video quality... It will be displaying DV converted to RGB colorspace, then converted to 800x600 (or whatever ) dimensions, then converted to composite without recompressing to DV and YUV colorspace; plus the interlacing will be totally different.

I would rather have a second PC monitor, to get the advantage of hi-rez and the bigger desktop, and definitely use the pass-through for quality assessment.

HTH, MPH

Tips:
http://www.martyhedler.com/homepage/Vegas_Tutorials.html

sqblz wrote on 1/13/2003, 11:11 AM

Complications, complications , ...

musicvid:

>>>"Using the "Preview in Player" option to selectively render portions of your project in a format that WILL output full screen Overlay through your Geforce, and give quite a nice picture on your TV"
OK to me, but it seems that I am unable to overlay *anything* through my GF and get a "quite nice" picture in my TV. The best that I get is trash (muddy, faded). How ???
>>>"I have devised a very quick render method using Huffyuv"
That interests me even while I am struggling to handle the overlay output. Please kindly mail me at sqblz@myrealbox.com if you can teach me. Many thanks.

martyh:
>>>"I would rather have a second PC monitor, to get the advantage of hi-rez and the bigger desktop, and definitely use the pass-through for quality assessment."
my board has VGA out and TVout *only*. How do I manage to connect a second monitor ?

Lucky me, I have not bought anything yet (still testing with my family TV), and I can get my hands in a TV or a PC monitor for almost the same cost.
But I WANTED to preview in the second display, no matter what ... besides buying a new GBoard, that is.

Thanks again.

musicvid10 wrote on 1/13/2003, 11:44 AM

sqblz,
To enable overlay support on your TV-Out, right-click on a blank area on your desktop, click "Properties." When Display Properties pops up, click "Settings." Then click "Advanced," and click the "Geforce 2 MX/MX400" tab.

From here, the details will be different depending on your driver version, but you need to check "Clone" as your nView Display Mode, then find the Overlay Properties tab (it may take some looking), and check "Secondary Display" as your Full Screen Device.

Now files like AVI, MPEG, MOV, and DVDs (if you have a DVD-ROM) should pop up and play full screen with overlay res on your TV. Any fuzziness or muddiness past this point is a result of the TV set...

When I get home this evening, I will send you a detailed procedure for quick-rendering huffyuv for overlay playback, in the meantime you can play with some different formats and compressors in the Preview in Player option, or use your existing files to get everything working. Uncompressed AVI's will not work.

Hope this helps,
Mark

FuTz wrote on 1/13/2003, 4:39 PM

I got a fairly old graphic card but still working very well for my needs. It's the Matrox 450 Millenium. With this card, I have a function, in DualHead mode, called DVDMax DualHead. This function puts what's on a ***Player*** on your computer screen right to a standard TV set. And it works really A-1-A. I regularly rent DVDs at my video place and put these films on my TV.
Now, it works with Quicktime, with MediaPlayer, with DivX players...
Question: how come Sonic Foundry can't program something that would make the preview monitor "pass through" the graphic card's option instead of having to hook up my cam through firewire then to TV? It would be SO much MORE simple !!!
Maybe coding the preview monitor to be "seen" by graphic card as a "self-standing player device" instead of "some window in an application" ??? I ask cause I'm sure there are a few graphic cards out there with this option...

musicvid10 wrote on 1/13/2003, 9:08 PM

sqblz,
I'll put the particulars here, in case somebody else with a Geforce/TV Out wants to try the Preview in Player in VV to send overlay to their TV:

--Set nView mode to "Clone," Overlay/Full-Screen Device to "Secondary Display," per previous post.
--Set Primary Display to 16 Bit (important).
--Set up a render template: 320x240, 29.970, Progressive, 1:1, Huffyuv 2.1.1, Interleave .250, 44k 16-bit Stereo.
--In Huffyuv Properties, select RGB Method as "Convert to YUY2" (important).
--I use Media Player 6.4 as my AVI default because it's efficient.

You can use 640x480 but it renders slower.
If you already have DirectX 9 installed you have to replace quartz.dll with an older version. If someone wants the 8.1b version, I can put it up on my ftp site.
None of this will probably work with Win XP due to lack of VFW support. However you should be able to use other codecs with some loss of quality and rendering speed.
I've tried every combination I can think of, and this is the fastest. 640x480 of course is clearer. Post back if you have ?

sqblz wrote on 1/15/2003, 4:12 AM

Thanks very much, musicvid, I will follow your advices and see what gives.

futz, I second your opinion about Vegas improvement on this subject. But maybe SoFo is not listening here (sometimes they aren't ... ;-) ) so I would suggest you to post the suggestion to the improvements request mail.

Cheesehole wrote on 1/15/2003, 11:51 PM

the real point of previewing this stuff on a TV is to see what it will look like in the end when people are watching it right? so in that case the 1394 / DV pass-through solution is the best. that shows you exactly what you are going to get.

BillyBoy wrote on 1/16/2003, 10:00 AM

Not exactly, but very close. As I have discovered, even taking painstaking steps to ensure my external monitor was calibrated as close as possible manually without using expensive wave generators, my little TV I use as my external monitor had to be fudged just a tad to make it match the output of its big brother in the family room. that also underwent a grueling calibration process.

Of course only a true knob twister like me worries about such nitpicky things. And only after setting up both TV's side by side both feed the same signal could you see a tiny differnce in hue and levels. <wink>

Cheesehole wrote on 1/16/2003, 11:11 PM

>>>Not exactly, but very close.

I guess that's why they say NTSC means Never The Same Color :)

FuTz wrote on 1/17/2003, 12:44 AM

I wish they'd make a big big big cleanup concerning exterior monitoring that would make it easy to hookup/operate and flawless as well. An application taking care of these holy poisoning ways to make things ***from the start to the end of project*** with ratios and the way we want it to be in the end like "source:16x9 - final project:16x9" (it's an example, everything could be checked before with a template or thumbnails ). Full interchangeability between formats (of course) and with a preview and a full manual mod/adjustment system.

sqblz wrote on 1/17/2003, 4:09 AM

futz, that's a dream. You're dreamin', man (gal?)
After reading from all of you, I'll stick with 1394, passthru the camera. What the hell, the camera won't last eternally anyway.
What an imperfect world this is ...

JJKizak wrote on 1/17/2003, 8:00 AM

Why flog a dead horse? Get the firewire card and the Canopus
ADVC-100 and be done with it. You can't engineer something that has not
been engineered yet. Those TV monitor outputs on the video cards are
strictly utilitarian. They are engineered for monitors and LCD's. Maybe
in the future they will be OK, but not now. That is why SOFO used the
firewire port. I am from the "General Patton" school of correction.
"When you have a problem, junk the stuff you have and do it the right way".
Thats why I junked the Pinnacle DC-2000 ($2000.00) when I switched to
Vegas. I apologize for being so abrupt, but my methods work.

James J. Kizak

sqblz wrote on 1/17/2003, 9:04 AM

JJKKIZAK, you're not abrupt, you're rich !

I don't put all my eggs in the same basket, I like editing video but I also like travelling on my own to the other side of the world to record the scenes ... :-)
A Canopus (which I don't have) costs $$$. My 1394 came free with my Pinnacle Studio (r.i.p.) and my GBoard is a GF4 MX440 with TVOut for free. No frivolous expenses here.

Likewise, I could go to a Matrox Parhelia and be the coolest kid in block, but then I would have to spare some lobster dinners here and there...

Nah, matter of choice, I guess,

mikkie wrote on 1/17/2003, 9:09 AM

For what it's worth, going the firewire route as suggested is about the only way to reliably achieve this without haveing to fear future software driver problems and such.

What you're after is something Matrox offered with their old Marvel series -- whether it's still an option with some matrox hardware I couldn't say, but the company went through some personality changes so I wouldn't take their word for it - talk to matrox users. Their setup used to take the video overlay window and send that to the TV out. As far as the old Marvel's go, don't even think about it, even though you could pick one up for a song -- won't work well with anything newer then win98 original version.

ATI's VE line did this, as did their original radeon 8500. However, as they've changed their catalyst drivers quite a bit, can't say how or if it works and with what cards -- you'd have to check their site. Their AIW line generally does the full screen to TV out. Visit the ati site and nose around.

The Geforce line is something of a special case. The actual chipset design allows for TV out, but it's up to the individual manufacturer to implement it & how to support it in software. I've read that most of the implementations were problematic, but never really researched it. You might want to try other drivers & software from other companies, but you might also have to research the hacks needed to use them.

mike

sqblz wrote on 1/17/2003, 9:31 AM

Nice reply, mikkie. Thanks.
I still have a Matrox Mystique AND Rainbow Runner in my dump. Maybe if I .... oh, I have all my PCI's full. Well, then ... damn !!!

FuTz wrote on 1/17/2003, 10:17 AM

"I don't put all my eggs in the same basket, I like editing video but I also like travelling on my own to the other side of the world to record the scenes ... :-)
A Canopus (which I don't have) costs $$$. My 1394 came free with my Pinnacle Studio (r.i.p.) and my GBoard is a GF4 MX440 with TVOut for free. No frivolous expenses here.

Likewise, I could go to a Matrox Parhelia and be the coolest kid in block, but then I would have to spare some lobster dinners here and there...

Nah, matter of choice, I guess,"

...I was about to say the exact same thing... ;D

sqblz wrote on 1/17/2003, 11:37 AM

yeah futz, maybe I've already seen you at the seafood restaurant ;D

shawnm wrote on 1/19/2003, 3:39 PM

"Likewise, I could go to a Matrox Parhelia and be the coolest kid in block, but then I would have to spare some lobster dinners here and there...

Nah, matter of choice, I guess,"

Sounds more like a matter priorities/utility - If your living depends in some way on having the right tools (no mater what the job is), you'll sacrifice a trip or two and few lobster dinners. If however, you're more of a hobbyist, then it doesn’t make sense to shell out thousands of dollars/pounds/euros/yen on gear that will bring you no monies in return. Personally, if all I was doing was capturing clips of my vacations and children's birthday parties - I wouldn’t even bother with Vegas, I would skip straight to Video Factory. Just my opinion.

Thanks,

Shawn