External Monitoring in CS6

Question

Harm, I don't know if you remember me as I haven't been here since Premiere Pro 6.0, but I just upgraded to CS3 and now CS6.  These Adobe forums are so over-produced I can't find the correct place to post this question so I hope you will forgive me.  How do you get Premiere Pro CS6 to output to an NTSC monitor.  I was outputting to this monitor under CS3 by using a Grass Valley conterter box coming out of the system firewire, but it doesn't seem to work under CS6. 
Thanks, James
[email protected]
610-688-9212

Answer 1

James Jaeger wrote:
Also I note that some of the reviews on Amazon about the MX02 are not very good, also stating that Matrox's customer service is bad.  I tend to agree.  My experience with Matrox is their stuff is over-priced **** and they don't back it up with good customer service or returns.  AND they're not even IN the US.  But you also say the Black Magic card is ****.  So I put some of this back on Adobe:
Adobe:  you're a multi-billion dollar corporation that has finally, after 10 - 15 generations, designed a very nice editing app, but getting the final product of this app, what us editors slave over, is still a bag of worms.  Use some of your clout and make this go away.
James, I can only tell you my experience with Matrox, with only two products, a graphics card from 2000 that was great, and the MXO2 Mini Max, which at least for me has worked great so far. I got one of those great deals B&H has once in a while and I got it for about $600. However, the same model without the Max is about $400 and still gives you perfect output to any HDMI or component monitor or TV set.
In my over ten years of editing video, everything I've read and heard from professionals is that a dedicated timeline monitoring card is absolutely necessary, unless your only delivery is for web or local computer playback. There is absolutely no way that a computer graphics card will deliver the video signal that will tell you exactly what the final product is going to be once it's on the air, or on a Blu-ray, especially when it's interlaced. And this I saw for myself when I couldn't afford one of these cards and I had to use Vegas and Premiere with their full screen modes on my TV set, which acts as a second monitor. Any footage that was interlaced looked totally different as far as the motion goes, and the levels were off. Levels can be calibrated to a certain extent, with test patterns and with your own tests, recording a static scene where you have different levels of light, and especially a couple of items that you can barely see, to switch back and forth between the camera's input and the computer's input, but it won't be exactly the same. But there's nothing you can do about the interlaced footage, unless you never use such footage.
As for what you say to Adobe, I fully agree. It can't be possible that Adobe tries to position Premiere as a professional NLE and many people still have problems with external monitoring cards. Before Premiere CS6 I was using Edius, which I stopped using for creative reasons, but there is no other NLE in the industry that is more reliable and fast. Grassvalley makes not only the software but the hardware, not the full workstation but the monitoring card. This ensures that both are absolutely compatible with each other. I used Edius for weeks without a single crash, and when it did it was usually because of some 3rd party plugin. The other very important thing is that Edius can do everything Premiere does when it comes to real time, but without the expensive CUDA card. In fact, Edius has much faster real time playback and scrubbing than Premiere, all by using just the CPU, which makes obvious that Adobe at some point made a deal with Nvidia, or maybe Grass Valley (formerly Canopus) has the smartest programmers in the world, because I see no other way that can be explained.