Is it possible (has someone tried) to put 2 graphics cards into a machine and hook up 3 LCD displays so you can have the AVID running on 2 displays as per normal and the 3rd display permanently in full screen mode?

Or am I just asking for trouble?

 I think some of the folks have done it with Xpress Pro - check these threads:

http://community.avid.com/forums/p/50105/282929.aspx#282929

http://community.avid.com/forums/p/24271/136166.aspx#136166

http://community.avid.com/forums/p/49273/278951.aspx#278951

As I remember, it was important to use cards from the same "family" (i.e., Quadro) for the best results to avoid driver conflicts.

Hope it helps!

Ken

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you intend, but maybe...

I was running three screens on two cards, but MC didn't like it. this was two screens connected to nvidia GF7900GTO, third one to an older matrox card. I always had to disable the matrox card or MC wouldn't start, so i threw out the matrox, and instead connected two screens to the same port of the nvidia board using matrox' dualhead2go extender box and the third screen to the other port.

This box presents itself to the graphics card as one doublesized screen (2560 x 1024) and internally splits the display to serve two identical 1280x1024 displays:

This works without trouble, as the system only sees two screens at one card, and image quality is perfect (I was a little concerned that the high horizontal resolution could cause problems, but it's just fine).

Of course this setup is not avid-approved, and of course i'm no poweruser, so no warranty expressed... But as my system has been running MC 2.8 rock solid for a couple of weeks and didn't show any change with MC 3.0 now, i'm rather positiv about my decision.

It's not an officially sanctioned setup, but I used to run a configuration with two identical Quadros when I was developing the Full Screen Play feature.  The trick is the primary card (the one on the fastest slot if they are not matched slots) should be used to drive the monitors that you want to use for Full Screen Play and the Composer Window.  All video that plays to the desktop should be driven by the same card. Use your other card for bins, tools, title tool, etc.

So instead of MacFly, we have MacWilliams?

 ...and a macjaeger

principal software engineer posting in the forums wow now thats new thinking

and thanks it just feels good to have this kind of support

Brian Williams:

It's not an officially sanctioned setup, but I used to run a configuration with two identical Quadros when I was developing the Full Screen Play feature.  The trick is the primary card (the one on the fastest slot if they are not matched slots) should be used to drive the monitors that you want to use for Full Screen Play and the Composer Window.  All video that plays to the desktop should be driven by the same card. Use your other card for bins, tools, title tool, etc.

 

 

Hi,

I,ve been running this way for HD monitoring on a basic corporate spot, at that time I was figuring out the pros and cons of this set up and there was a lot of posts about how to get the best of this FSP feature. I'll try to recap what I and others have experienced.

First of all even with a classic 2 screens set up the FSP feature needs a trick to display a correct preview, meaning with no horizontal tearing line showing up on shots with movements. Overall quality, especialy regarding motion can be improved this way. I will not detail this method in this post, anyone interested can just perform a search for FSP in the forums.

Now with two GPUs an a 3 screens set up, what you've said confirms my experience. The same card has to run FSP and the composer window, leaving the third monitor attached to the second GPU to display only bins and tools windows.

Actually when the composer windows are on this second GPU the video keeps working on the FSP monitor but no video displays in the composer source/record windows. What happens thougt is that FSP quality is really improved in this case. Looks like when one GPU is only used to perform FSP (and displays bins but not the composer windows), FSP is a lot better.

Well that being said, FSP is still a preview that can be handy when working in HD but no real monitoring solution, I guess ok for pretty basic projects, and with not a lot of fast moving shots or fast edits sequences. (better if footage is not interlaced)

I've read in a recent post that some users felt that somehow FSP quality was improved in MC3, has there been any changes to improve it? Anyways, I'm waiting for my MC3 box upgrade to arrive and will share my experience on this soon.

Keep up the good work, oh and by the way, if you could provide us with an afordable monitoring only solution as this is the last thing missing for avid's offering to be really complete...

 Thanks a lot to all of you for your replies. I think I am going to try buying an identical card to the one I have now and install them on my new motherboard which has 4*16x slots. Then I'll follow your advice. Will let you know what happens.

To my knowledge, we didn't make any improvements to FSP as part of MC 3.0.  There were changes back in 2.8, to expand the luminance and sync page flipping.

It is possible that some of the improvements we made for scalability also increased image quality.

Just check that your motherboard will run more that one PCI-e X16 slot at full speed.  Some mobos throttle back as you populate the additional slots.

Actually, only the card that runs the FSP and composer window should need to run on a x16 slot.  The card driving the monitor isn't being used for any real-time graphics work for the most part.  You are not running the cards in a SLI or Crossfire configuration, so they really don't need to be in matched slots.  You really only need matched cards to eliminate driver issues.

The system I developed FSP on had a x16 and a x8 slot, although both were mechanically x16.

 So this "dualhead2go" box sounds cool I have a quadro fx 3450 could i use the dualhead2go box on one DVI port for dual display and the s video out on the other port for FSP?  oh and by the way i run 2 1440 X 900 widescreen monitors

Yes, this should work the way you intend it to.

You must have identical resolutions with both monitors (you do), and your quadro board must support the high horizontal resolution (2880 x 900). Windows and Avid will treat the couple as one single, xxl wide screen, not knowing about the difference at all. And of course you can hook whatever device you like to the second port of your quadro, just like you did before.

Right now I have two 19" (1280x1024 x 2) TFTs connected to port 1 of my GeForce board via dh2go, and one 22" (1680x1050) widescreen connected to port 2 directly. Under windows this is plenty of screen space for my design and graphics work, and Avid will either use the full 4240 horizontal pixels as workspace (i don't need FSP with most of my SD projects) or switch the 22" to FSP for HDV projects. In the rare cases when i need "real" full-hd resolution i can even use port 1 for FSP, stretching over the full two 19" tfts (although this isn't fun because of the monitor frames).

I don't know if two identical gfx boards would allow for the same setup, i just had no second x16 port left...

Take a look at the matrox product pages here, there's even a "triplehead" version available...

£123 http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4XN8&SearchType=1&SearchTerms=DualHead2Go&PageMode=3&SearchKey=All&SearchMode=All&NavigationKey=0

I swould love to be able to have a std 50Hz PAL analogue output from my MC to a grade 2 monitor, but having seen the huge cost of the new Mojo DX (more than twice the cost of the already pricy analogue one) I will need to wait for a special job in to justify buying one of those (and even then it would be HDMI only, probably running at 60Hz and glitching on horiz movement?).

D