Well, i did it.. went out and got my G5 2x2.5, and stuck 2gigs o ram in it and 2x250gig Hard drives and bought the Production Suite. Installed it the other night and it all worked right out of the box. I currently have the stock ATI Radeon 9600 XT and, using adapters, Im driving two old 17" apple studio monitors.

Im thinking of looking into getting a 23" HD LCD TV monitor, with a VGA input. Is this an apropriate solution, or am I better off with a CRT TV monitor?
In anticipation of the Panasonic HVX200 P2 camera, the only tape machine I intend to have will be Mini DV, and I have no idea if it will port the HD signal. Im guessing it wont and that Ill need to monitor out of the video card. The 23" Cinema Displays are beautiful, and thats what Ill do if its the best solution vs the almighty dollar. Looking for a balance between money/ quality. That sweet spot, know what I mean?

Anyone's thoughts would be appreciated.

Hi Jason,

Actually my system is almost identical to yours! I have the dual 2.5 with 2.5GB RAM with the stock Radeon 9600 and 160 GB drive, plus a second 250GB SATA internal drive. I'm guessing you got a BTO machine from Apple's site, unless you threw away 500 MB of RAM and the 160GB drive! ;-)

I'm using the old Apple 21" CRT Studio display with a DVI > VGA adaptor as a primary screen, and a Sony 17" 1280x768 widescreen LCD panel with a ADC > VGA adaptor as a second screen.

Right now I'm not editing HD, just anamophic 16:9 DV. For that I have a third screen which is a 22" Samsung LTP227W 1280x720 HD LCD hooked up via component video to a Sony DVD recorder which connects to the mac via firewire.

I'm very happy with the image on this screen and compared a number of them before buying it (although price was a factor also :-) Now here are my random thoughts about all this. I also use the 22" Samsung - usings its DVI input - with my older G4 tower. As much as I like that screen for anamorphic 16:9 DV with the component inputs, I'm just not very impressed with the image via the G4's graphics card and DVI. For one thing, 1280x720 looks rather "chunky" on a 22" screen, especially when you compare it to the dot pitch on my 21" CRT which is running at 1600x1200. I would probably be happy with watching HD video on that screen, but as a computer monitor it just doesn't impress me.

By comparison, the 17" 1280x768 Sony LCD is pretty nice as a computer monitor. The dot pitch is more reasonable on the 17" screen, whereas when you look at the desktop on the 22" screen it looks like the "large print edition." Even so, when I drag a window from my 21" CRT to the 17" LCD you notice all the fonts getting larger (not a bad thing as I grow older though). Also, it's pretty much impossible to color balance the 21" CRT and 17" LCD, try though I have using both system preferences and builtin screen controls. This can get a little annoying in a dark room since the brighter, more contrasty LCD draws your eyes to it.

So, to try an summarize my ramblings, in an ideal world I would not mix CRT's and LCD's as computer monitors. But if you already have them, then that's a bonus and you just need to fiddle with the controls to do your best. Using a 22" LCD as an external video device to view your footage, either HD or SD, is probably a reasonable compromise. But it should be a third screen dedicated just to that function because the pixels look really large for a computer monitor.

I'm sure the Apple HD Cinema displays are the best solution if you can afford them. For monitoring HD some people are suggesting CRT sets since you can get real 1920x1080. The Apple screens can also do that, but the 23" consumer LCD HDTV/monitors are mostly 1280x768 or 1280x720.

Thanks Boyd,
That experience is a big help. Much appreciated.