I am planning to buy a new monitor to start editing on my PC.

The idea is to get a Dell 20" LCD to handle the images and use my Samsung 17" CRT to handle the program settings, where resolution is not so important.

Would that work? Any problems or anything you can foresee or criticize in such a setup? Monitors should be the same?

The video board is an ATI with 128MB and the program will have to be XL, which I know little about (I use 2000pro), because most better editing programs are designed to work within it.

For now I will handle DV stuff, but plan to go onto HDV when I can afford it. Probably later this year.


Carlos

I don't know much about the ATI card, but most dual head video cards allow different resolutions on each monitor. If you wanted to go 800x600 on your 17 and 1024x768 on your 20 it should be fine. Just make sure that the 20 inch monitor is your primary monitor.

Eddie

Which NLE are you using? Premiere Pro is one program which works best when both monitors are the same resolution.

2- With your ATI card, you may really benefit from the dual monitor utility Ultramon.

http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/

With Premiere and a ATI card, it may be the only way to get Premiere Pro onto both monitors. Haven't really tested that though.

The cool thing about ultramon is that it gives you two taskbars and lets you hotkey window switching to any key (like F1).

i haven't yet tried ultramon, but what i've found so far is that you have to set both monitors at the same rez to get both screens working with the editors i've tried so far... don't know about premiere.

you will want to put the moving video on the crt, because the contrast ratio is much better than the lcd... virtually all lcd's are incapable of displaying the full gray scale that's needed for things like serious photoshop use, and that will affect the way things are displayed with the nle... you will still have to do the final proofing of the video thru the firewire port to a real ntsc monitor.