Laptop as monitor???
 

I'm doing some tests for a possible promo and am wondering if I can use my laptop as a basic monitor via firewire. I don't have any additional software and not sure how the computer will respond. It also has 4 pin which I believe does not have power shorting issues, is this correct?

Thanks in advance, Greg.

Hi Greg,

Have you considered using HDVRack? It really is a great software for laptop use (PC only).

S.Noe

Hi Stephen,
I plan on getting round to using dv/hdv rack but this test is on Wednesday and I don't have any software. Do you know if I can just connect straight to a pc laptop and use it as a monitor somehow or will I need software of somekind?

Regards, Greg.

HDVrack has a 10 fully functioning trial. If you are doing a one day test and your laptop meets the specifications, the trial might be the best answer.

The question I have about HDV rack is how much delay is there between the action and the image on the laptop screen? Because I think it would be hard to use it to pull focus unless there is maybe 2 frames or less of delay.

But if that baby is realtime then I think I'm getting one... I only hope I can get it to work with my Mac Power Book (via Boot Camp and all that).

So is there any delay? Anybody here used it to pull focus?

Do you know of software for the MAC as monitor?

I have been thinking of ditching the big Sony monotor and getting this one for my mac laptop:

http://www.redlightningsoftware.com/Home.html

I have posted a couple of time to find out if anyone has used it and I did not get any replys. It looks pretty nice.

You will need some kind of software. The HD100 sends out an MPEG2 transport stream and something on the computer needs to decode that into viewable images.

HDVRack is probably your best bet if you are a PC user. It has a lot of other very useful features beyond just monitoring, so it's well worth the price.

However, if you're only looking for a decent monitor and nothing else, consider getting a Gateway FPD2185W LCD computer monitor. It has HD analog component video inputs that work great with the HD100, and it's been coming down in price (was $799 CDN in April, now $499 CDN on sale this week - not sure about price/availability in the UK, though).

Are you going to shoot DV or HDV?

That Red Lightning Software monitor looks like it only works in a SD mode, not HD. They show an HVX hooked up but from the look of it (4x3 with letterboxing for 16x9) it's running in SD. I could be wrong but I can't find anything on the site that claims it's doing HDV monitoring.

I have tried, with fail, in our studio monitoring HDV with our sony SD monitor and learned the hard way, it's only good for framing, period.


Using a laptop to try and monitor is a bad idea, keep looking. Just an opionion, but you asked. ;)

This page says that the Red Lightening software is SD only:
http://www.redlightningsoftware.com/Download.html

HDV Rack
 

I tried the HDV rack demo and there is a really, really, REALLY long delay even when you set it at lower resolution. You can't operate with it at all as a monitor.

It's still good to light with I guess because of the waveform and I may still buy it, but if you need to lug around another monitor anyway why not just light with that?

I wish the HDV trial was longer. It might have given me a chance to test it more than once and work out some of the issues.

Thanks Eric,

Very interesting. Out of interest what setup did you run the software on. Only asked because I'm wondering if the lag is due to slow processor or something. Doesn't sound to good as a monitor though if you were running it on a suitable system.


Greg

Hey Earl,

Where's the sale?

The sale's on at Futureshop until the end of October. It says "Clearance" in the index so they may not be around long.

It was a 2GHz Pentium M notebook running win XP. I'm getting a new notebook in another week or so - probably an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz which should be slightly better. I doubt it will make much difference in usability as a monitor to operate from but I plan to test HDV rack again anyway. I'll post results then.

I should also say that I was testing HDV rack in HDV mode. I didn't test DV.