video card recommendations?

daves2 wrote on 7/11/2003, 4:01 PM
I am thinking about adding a video card to my machine to support a second monitor for more workspace when editing. If I could get one that would help w/ real time preview that would be great too. I don't need to preview tons of special effects since these are mostly for home / wedding videos, etc. but it wouldn't hurt. I currently do my encoding w/ s/w (procoder for the most part or vegas).

I thought I saw recommedations somewhere on cards compatible w/ vegas. Matrox doesn't support vegas afaik. I could go w/ an ATI, etc. but I thought that sofo had some recommendations on cards.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I don't yet know what I want to spend.

Comments

FuTz wrote on 7/11/2003, 4:52 PM

I run this (now) old Matrox Millenium G450 without any problem...
For my next system (around december maybe...), I'm considering the Parhelia or the G750.
kilroy wrote on 7/11/2003, 6:06 PM

Matrox G series cards here, no complaints, good color depth, resolution, nary a hitch to be found.
Chienworks wrote on 7/11/2003, 6:13 PM
At church I run Vegas on a Matrox G400 and a G450, no problems with either. At home i run it on an ATI Rage Fury VIVO with no problems. The only problem i had with Matrox and SonicFoundry was with SoundForge 5, but that was corrected by setting the "compatibility mode" in SoundForge's display preferences.

Your video card won't help with realtime preview speed in the slightest.* Vegas doesn't make use of any video hardware acceleration, so don't worry about trying to find the right card for this ... there isn't one. All Vegas needs is a card with enough memory to support the resolution you want to use at 24 bits for full color. Anything beyond this is a waste.

*Well, technically this isn't precisely true. Very slow ancient cards can't update the screen as fast so there may be an extremely miniscule performance hit, but you'd be hard pressed to notice the difference.
craftech wrote on 7/12/2003, 6:17 AM
Chienworks is absolutely correct. I use a 3DFX Voodoo 5 5500 AGP card which works just fine. The company which manufactured it is actually out of business.

John
Barrie wrote on 7/15/2003, 4:43 PM
ATI 9800 / 9700 series can run 2 VGA monitors. My ATI 9700TX card and dual 19" crts work fine with almost all programs including Vegas. Can have different display res on each monitor. Minor problem is that QuickTime movie player and both of my games only work on the primary monitor.
gnfoster wrote on 7/16/2003, 9:40 AM
Using two Nvidia cards here. One at 64MB and the other at 32MB. Running on an AMD 900 with Via chipset based motherboard. No problems whatsoever.

gnfoster