what card for editing video on 19" LCD?

[FijiJohn]

I edit video and I'm using a 19" LCD screen (75Hz refresh). At times I will want a 2nd monitor as well. No gaming (on this machine). Noise level is important. Suggestions? (WinXP, 2500+ slightly OC'd, 8RDA+, 1.5GB Crucial PC3200 and a LOT of drive space.)

[Imperion1]

How much are you willing to spend on the vid card?

If money is no object, then there is always the Wildcat cards.
http://www.3dlabs.com/

[FijiJohn]

Looks like the Wildcat 560 is less than $150. Is that a good choice? (And is the fan quiet?)

[zybch]

Does it really matter?
Just about all cards these days have similar 2D speeds, and if its just video editing it just seems stupid to spring for an expensive card when something like your bog standard GF4mx would do just as well but at 1/4 the price.
Something with dual head might be a wise move though as a second screen is very useful when editing video, even if its just a 15" LCD or 17"CRT.

[FijiJohn]

Originally posted by zybch
Does it really matter?
Well, I am having trouble getting my on-screen playback to go full speed. I was told that the problem is likely my video card. My drives are plenty fast for DV and it's a stripped down system with a 2500 processor so I son't know what else might be slowing me up.

[zybch]

Even an old S3 virge is fast enough to display DVD quality (720x640/576) video, so it seems unlikley that if you have a recent card, the problem lies there.

When you say on-screen playback, do you mean you have trouble of watching a job with transitions and effects that hasn't been rendered? All of those fancy wipes and disolves are pretty intense stuff to be calculating on-the-fly.

I think that there is a Canopus card that has special built in accelleration for up to 6 concurrent effects. You might need a card like that unless you don't mind waiting for your masterpieces to be rendered into a file before watching.

[FijiJohn]

I'm using Vegas Video 4 which allows you to pre-render effects pretty much automatically (if you have enough RAM, hence my 1.5GB). And actually, most of the stuff I do does not have a lot of fancy effects. Unless you do commercials or rock videos there's not a lot of need for anything more than crossfades and cuts. I have an SIS 315 at the moment and it does not seem to perfrom as well as my old GeForce 2 MX440. I'm working pretty much only in DV these days and I'm not clear how the display of that is really handled (e.g., since it is like MPEG does the card itself do the decompression or is all of that done by the app?).