What are you guys using to output to a monitor? I am using the black magic Intensity pro but the playback but it drops frames on the most basic transistions. It can do a 1 second dissolve but just barely. It has done this for 3 generations of machines now including my new Sandybridge

I've been using Matrox hardware for about 10 years now, currently on MXO2 Mini. Haven't tried Intensity, but surprised to hear about frame drops, doesn't sound right, could be other factors at play. No troubles with MXO2, even outputs from After Effects, Photoshop and Encore.

Jeff Pulera
Digital Vision

You know I guess I thought Premiere was further along than it is. I have a quad core 2600K and it cant seem to do a 1 second 3D push without stopping. I thought it was the card but it wasnt it was just that the card makes it play in full res where if I pick full res without the card it stops too.

From the sound of things, you got the card back at a time where it was hard to monitor HD footage to an external monitor or a second computer screen and i/o cards provided a practical way to accomplish it. I/o cards are no longer necessary if that is what you want to do.

Depending on what you want to do with PPro, you may very well decide to dispense with the i/o card in your Sandybridge system. Every MPE-capable nVidia display card --- at least every one that I know of --- will allow PPro to feed two DVI (computer) monitors and also let you feed a computer monitor and an HDMI signal out to a tv. Both options let you to send your timeline monitoring to the second computer monitor or the tv, as you choose. There were several long threads on this a few months ago. Here is one of them:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-creative-suite/495403-previewing-hd-second-monitor.html

It was started with by somebody who had been using a Matrox RX card with older versions of PPro. He had not realized he could get all of the functionality he wanted from a current video card and no longer needed an i/o card.

Some of us do find i/o cards useful for the way we work. Like Jeff, I've been using the Matrox MXO2 mini for several years (back starting with CS4). I use an MXO2 mini because I like a 3 screen editing set-up. My editing bay has an hdmi-fed tv on the left for timeline monitoring and color matching, a center computer monitor for the main PPro editing screen and the right hand computer monitor for the multi-cam view. I can function with a two screen set-up but prefer not to. Another reason that I use the Matrox mini is because it has calibration tools which are good enough for my work, which often involves matching cameras in my multi-cam projects.

If you neither need nor want, a three screen set-up, you no longer need a card for monitoring with the later versions of PPro.

Also, I wonder if there might be some hardware issues besides your BMD card. I can think of several possibilities, although you may already have ruled them out. First thing: have you checked project/program settings to be sure you have hardware MPE enabled for your projects? Second,if hardware MPE is enabled, are you using MPE-enabled transitions? THird, are you running your video from a drive other than the one with your OS and programs? (Running CS 5/5.5 projects from your system drive can make things bog down to the point of being usable). If you are using multiple drives, how full are they? (When drives get over 75% full, they can reallllllllllly slllllowwwwww waaaaayyyyyy dooooowwwwnnnnnnn.)

If you have already checked into these points, never mind.

I also have been using Matrox cards for a long time. RT.X10/100/2 and most recently the MXO2 mini. The MXO2 is great for output to an HDMI monitor for reviewing your cut. I got mine because in addition to monitoring, it can take in and output HDMI, component, & composite video to and from your system. I no longer used taped based sources nor do I output to tape-based media so I'm actually selling mine.

If you're interested, take a look at the link below. It has the capability of being used on a desktop or a laptop with an ExpressCard slot. Enjoy!

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/private-classifieds/505087-matrox-mxo2-mini.html

I am kinda playing a fine line I use Edius and Premiere and I have 2 video cards one Nvida for GPU acceleration and a onboard video card for quicksync encoding out of Edius. I wonder if I could hook up a 3rd monitor to one of the free ports.

You can indeed hook another monitor to your nVidia card. However, the fact that you are running two separate video cards already plus an BMD card suggests some places to look to system bottlenecks and slowdowns with PPro.

Disregard that last post. I overlooked that you are using Quicksync which is the accelerator that is on-board the I7-2600k. I gather you run from Quicksync with Edius and shut it off to run the nVidia with PPro. However, when you are working in PPro check the settings to be sure that you have hardware MPE enabled. When you are switching video outputs, PPro might not have recognized the change back to nVidia.

All I have to change is which is my primary video card.

Currently I'm using a Kona 3 with a AJA HDP which converts an HD-SDI from the card to DVI. Using just a 23 inch HP LCD. Now my only issue is that the Kona 3 driver some times drops audio. So I route the sound threw my internal sound card and it drops less. Cuda enabled GTX 285 nVidia card ramps up renders by 6x. I'm using a Mac Pro 4,1 with Lion.

I've tried the secondary DVI off the card for playback with some great results. I just like using the Kona 3 when I layoff and capture to see my video full screen for any errors.

Haven't messed with BlackMagic yet. I have one of there $295 SDI capture cards. Maybe I'll give that a shot to see if its better than the Kona 3. AJA makes and supports great cards.

I had a few issues with Blackmagic when I tried it out a while back. The big issue was not so much image quality or the card itself, but what I had to do in Premiere to make it work. I had to move off of the Mercury Playback engine which meant that I lost my CUDA cores- the card requires you to use its own playback engine. I didn't realize how much of a difference it would make until I hit play and the computer did nothing when I was trying to stream 3 AVCHD streams.

I ended up just putting an extra video card in my system and I'm using that now (2 Nvidia cards now for double screens plus a TV). That has worked in general quite well and only cost me an extra $75. The downside is that since I use a seperate audio card for my sound, there are sync issues between the TV and the sound card. These issues would not exist if I was playing sound off the TV. This afternoon, I'll be getting my Matrox Mojito Max in the mail so I look forward to giving that a go. Should solve the sync issues as well as get quality video to my TV.

-Ben