View Full Version : s-video/composite video card for Mac/FCP?


Cole McDonald
October 10th, 2006, 01:46 PM
I'm looking for a low cost card that will allow me to attach a CRT TV to act as a second monitor on my editing station. Any recommendations?

I have open PCI slots. dual 1.42 Ghz Powermac G4

William Hohauser
October 10th, 2006, 02:49 PM
I'm looking for a low cost card that will allow me to attach a CRT TV to act as a second monitor on my editing station. Any recommendations?

I have open PCI slots. dual 1.42 Ghz Powermac G4

If you have a second DVI monitor port you could purchase an Apple DVI to Video adapter. Works great. Otherwise you should check out the ATI web site and see if they still have any video cards that do this.

Cole McDonald
October 10th, 2006, 06:56 PM
have an ATI 9700 Pro Mac with an open DVI port (ADC goes to monitor)...looks like the DVI > video adaptor is a great solution! Thank you!

Boyd Ostroff
October 10th, 2006, 08:31 PM
I doubt that they still make it (?) but the ATI Radeon 7000 Mac Edition sounds like exactly what you want. I've got one lying around still, there are probably others forsale out there.

It has a DVI port, a VGA port and an s-video port (with an adaptor for composite). You can use any two of those three ports simultaneously. It's a regular PCI card which can go in any open slot on your G4. Don't know whether they've kept the drivers up to date...

Cole McDonald
October 10th, 2006, 09:22 PM
most of the supported cards stay supported...mostly thanks to the BSD/Darwin relationship :) I've had some really weird hardware just work (nothing I'd trust to production...but cool anyway).

Brian Farris
October 10th, 2006, 10:19 PM
The way I have it set up is I have a DV Tape deck. I have that plugged into firewire to my G5, and I have the s-video from the tape deck going to a video monitor. I then have Final cut set to output video preview thru firewire and it feeds it to the monitor (Powermac>(firewire)>dv deck>(svideo)>video monitor.

You probably don't have to use a tape deck. I think that any good DV camera can input through firewire and output through s-video. I know I've done the same with my XL2 before we used our tape deck as a permanent solution.

Boyd Ostroff
October 11th, 2006, 08:22 AM
You probably don't have to use a tape deck.

If you want to go that route then a box like this will do the job, and also allow you to capture analog video:

http://www.adstech.com/products/API-558-EFS/intro/API-558_intro.asp?pid=API-558-EFS

Cole McDonald
October 11th, 2006, 12:25 PM
If you want to go that route then a box like this will do the job, and also allow you to capture analog video:

http://www.adstech.com/products/API-558-EFS/intro/API-558_intro.asp?pid=API-558-EFS


$180 for the breakout box or $18 for the adaptor. I have a camera I can use as throughput, but I use it as a camera, so I'm going to go with the $18 adaptor from apple.

Thank you all for your suggestions...I'm eventually going to get a deck so I don't wear my heads on my little camera, but until I can afford that...I'll keep using it.

William Hohauser
October 11th, 2006, 03:28 PM
$180 for the breakout box or $18 for the adaptor. I have a camera I can use as throughput, but I use it as a camera, so I'm going to go with the $18 adaptor from apple.

Make sure the adapter works with the card. By the way it's ten dollars less then when I bought one a month ago.