Question on Performance

MarcS wrote on 3/17/2004, 2:11 PM

I am a Canopus convert to Vegas 4. I currently have a dual Xeon 1.7 Ghz Dell WS 350 and a Canopus ACeDvio board to send output to my TV monitor. I was totally impressed with the quality of the near real time displays on my external monito, even on preview auto mode.

Just the other day I decided to buy a second flat panel computer monitor and hooked it up, with the primary flat panel monitor, to an older dual output video card I had laying around (an ATI Radeon) and continued using the external TV monitor. I felt very professional with 2 LCD's and a TV monitor.

Unfortunately, my external previews now all look very choppy and pixelated, unless I set my preview settings to Good or Best (which slows it down a lot). Before the previews were much cleaner and faster when I had the single LCD monitor setup.

Would adding a second LCD put a drain on my CPU to slow Vegas down? Could anyone gauge what might be wrong? I did have a fast NVidea graphics card in my initial setup. But as I understand Vegas doesn't use GPU, just CPU? Is that correct or should I invest in a new dual video monitor card with more horsepower. ?

Thanks so much,

MarcS

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 3/17/2004, 2:23 PM

Stick with firewire card to digital device (like video camera)or the Canopus, then its output to your external monitor.

Trying ANY video card method to output to a monitor for video playback is at best problematic and almost always lower quality. Vegas is much smarter that that old fashioned cheesy method of getting a signal out

When connected thusly, (through firewire) Vegas totally bypasses your video card. Going through a video card only introduces problems as you've seen.

MarcS wrote on 3/17/2004, 2:40 PM

Thanks for the reply. Perhaps I wasn't entirely clear.

My video card isn't connected to anything more than my two LCD monitors, allowing me to edit over 2 screens. It is an ATI Radeon card with a dual head dongle which connects to each LCD. No RCA or analog out whatsover.

My external NTSC monitor is hooked to the video out RCA jack of my ACeDvio board from Canopus - which is a DV/Analog 1394 type board. This board should appear like a DV camera to Vegas.

So I think I'm hooked up correctly. I may not be though and your help is greatly appreciated.

- Marc S