Video Card Importance

MarcS wrote on 3/11/2004, 1:14 PM
I am a new convert from Premier/Canopus to Vegas 4.

I was using a single 20" monitor with a moderate powered NVidea graphics card. I decided to get a second LCD monitor and now have both monitors plugged into an older Radeon ATI dual monitor video card I had laying around. My output on my preview screen now seems mcuh more pixelated and slower than it had been before. Similarly when I preview the output onto a TV Monitor through ACeDvio, it has to be set to Full mode or Best mode to get reasonable resolution.

Is this because of my switch to an older Graphics card? Does the quality of the graphics card have a big input into the real time output of Vegas?

Thanks,

Marc S

Comments

GaryKleiner wrote on 3/11/2004, 1:43 PM
The only way to see a proper video output on a TV or video monitor is to preview out via firewire. If you don't have a monitor with firewire inpput, it need to be transcoded to whatever your TV will accept (composite, SVideo, etc).

Gary
MarcS wrote on 3/11/2004, 2:02 PM
Thanks but I do have a ACeDvio card to convert my digital compressed output to the TV monitor. I was wondering if the processing power of the video graphics card plays an important part in the speed of Vegas's portayal of transitions, renders, etc.
TheDingo wrote on 3/11/2004, 2:25 PM
The quality of video cards has progressively gotten much better over the past 5 years.
I suspect that if you compared your nVidia card to a better quality ( and more recent )
ATI card the results would be simillar.

Myself I went dual TFT LCD about a year ago, and found that it makes a HUGE
difference if your monitors are connected via DVI versus the old 15-pin VGA
socket. ( I use a fairly cheap ASUS Video Studio Dual DVI card that's powered by
a low end nVidia GeForce 4 MX GPU. This cost me about $180 Canadian a year
ago. The image and colour quality is very good. Everything is pixel sharp now. )

riredale wrote on 3/11/2004, 3:48 PM
TheDingo:

This might be wandering away from the main thought in this thread, but can you elaborate a bit on your setup? In particular, how useful is a dual-monitor configuration, and how do you have Vegas running on both windows? What's the advantage?
GlennChan wrote on 3/11/2004, 5:05 PM
Dual monitors give you a lot more screen real estate than a single big monitor. Based on screen area, two monitors are definitely cheaper.

In Vegas you can utilize the second monitor effectively by putting some of the windows there, like the video preview, scopes, FX windows, etc.
MarcS wrote on 3/11/2004, 8:31 PM
I guess my question remains:

Do the 3 D rendering/graphic processing powers of the video boards play any role in the speed and clarity of how Vegas draws transitions during playback. Or, is it all CPU driven and the speed/quality of the cards generally insignificant?
farss wrote on 3/11/2004, 8:40 PM
Vegas ONLY uses the CPU not the GPU.
That may change shortly with Ver 5 but that's only an educated guess.