Hello,

Would this work? Get an apple DVI to Video converter which turns the video out to a SVideo or Composit out and then hook up an external broadcast monitor and use that as the full screen playbac from Avid? Would i be able to rely on this for color correction with a broadcast monitor? would this be beter than exporting to a 20 computer Monitor?

Thoughts?

Forgetting the DVI to video adapter, which may or may not exist, I do not think composite or SV is acurate enough for CC.  JMHO.

The DVI -> composite + s-video adapter exists and works for the full screen playback.  It has the advantage that you don't have the latency of a DV->analog transcoder

However, the broadcast monitor needs to be re-aligned for this signal using a testcard with PLUGE bars (the brightness need to be greatly lowered on the monitor because Avid doesn't display full blacks as full blacks but as a dark grey)  There is another thread concerning this problem...

To find out whether this setup could be trusted, I imported a testcard with a greyscale and looked on an oscilloscope to see if the waveform matches that out of a transcoder.   Checking the chroma is more complex and needs more specialised equipment (vectorscope etc.)   The luma (Y) signal does not match : the difference in black levels is problematic and personally I would not rely on this setup - the output from a DV transcoder being a better reference.  There is potentially a difference in gamma in the displayed image as well.

hope this is of use

just to add that it is a bad idea to use a computer monitor for colour correction too, they have very different characteristics from video monitors....and sometimes have colour casts etc...

That sounds right... I really didn't think it it would be a solution.. which is why they sell mojo and adrenaline... i think ill just stick with the dvi port connected to a computer monitor.

I've used the DVI to Video adaptor for a while now. I use it for other programs besides Avid. Since I have a Mojo the adaptor is used primarily for HD review. I wouldn't say it's even close to what you need for quality playback but it works....

So far I haven't succeeded in getting an HD 3rd monitor fully working on my MCsoft. Using a second display card, an NVIDIA 6600 with 256 Megs. I've hooked it to the DVI input of a 1080p LCD that also accepts 1080i and 720p (a Westinghouse LVM-37w3).

When I set the display prefs to 1920x1080 and test it with QT player, I CAN PLAY exported 1080i video in full screen mode. In fact it’s freaking gorgeous. So the hardware and system setup would seem to be working.

However inside Media Composer 2.6.6 on a Quad G5, no way of setting up full screen display gives me a correct raster. It's collapsed vertically to about half the screen height and the lines are interlaced irregularly. When I back off the display preferences to 1280x720 then media composer can display a coherent picture but it doesn't fill the screen. It may be doing a 1280x720 native area within the center of the 1080 LCD but I'm not sure. Also it's displaying one field of the video only. I can see the other field if I one-field-jog through it but in play mode the diagonals have the jaggies.

My main question is: Has anyone succeeded at filling a 1920x1080 monitor with the DVI out of Avid MC or AXP?

    It depends on ther resolution of the originating video. The Avid does not scale video up in software so it can't fill the screen unless the screen is close to the native resolution of the video you are displaying.

Sorry that is not a very satisfactory answer. I am using 1080i media.