Stretch your Screen by Using the Matrox Parhelia APVe - Review

By Mark Richards 

Do you want to improve your video editing experience? Maybe you just want make watching internet videos and DVD video a lot more fun. Maybe you love playing computer video games that require lots of pixel power,

You need an extra monitor or two or three.  You need open up and install a video card like the Matrox Parhelia APVe 128 MB graphics card that provides the capability to connect extra video and computer monitors.  

Depending on how you decide to set up your system, you can run either three computer displays or two computer displays and a TV display at the same time. If you are working with high definition, the Parhelia card supports HD output for NTSC and PAL in both 4x3 and 16x10 formats..

The Parhelia card can make it easy to design a video editing workstation with dual displays and a TV monitor or VCR hooked up to the third output. Or, you can spread your editing environment across two computer display screens and then preview and output your video on the video monitor. As you can guess, this is very useful for those of us who are editing video for broadcast uses or for distribution via DVD or videotape. 

By the way, if you are capturing using composite video camera (S-video or VHS), the card offers both composite and S-video inputs. You won’t need a separate digitizing card to convert your old video to digital in order to edit it.

 And as the Parhelia card offers standard NTSC or PAL outputs (component, S-video and composite), you can run that video and audio signal to a VCR, DVD or other video recording device and make copies directly from your computer.

If you don’t want TV preview, you can use the extra monitor connections to expand your video editing acreage onto three computer displays. Many game players will choose that option in order to create an immersive environment where they are surrounded by images and screaming video.

 Mac Users and Windows Users can now easily add extra monitors to their machines without having to open up their machines and add in special video cards.  Matrox Graphics Inc. announced that the Matrox DualHead2Go™ and TripleHead2Go™ are now compatible with Windows and Mac® systems. From the Graphics eXpansion Module (GXM) product line, both DualHead2Go and TripleHead2Go are palm-sized boxes that connect externally to a notebook or desktop computer and uniquely allow users to attach two or three monitors respectively for an incredible multi-monitor configuration. This is great for video editing! more

The Tech Specs 

According to Matrox, the 128MB Parhelia APVe card features dual 400 MHz RAMDACs with independent lookup tables for fully symmetric DualHead resolutions up to 1920 x 1440 per display and advanced Dual-DVI technology for crisp, clear resolutions up to 1920 x 1200 per digital flat panel. It supports both 1080i and 720p resolutions for HDTV via an included YPbPr analog component cable.

 The Parhelia card supports various multiple display configurations including  Dual-display plus HDTV output, Dual-DVI plus SDTV output, TripleHead Desktop Mode, DualHead Clone, and DualHead Zoom, among others. You can mix and match your video displays and monitors (see charts below)

Multi-display configurations

• Same resolution required on each display.

The Parhelia APVe features several advanced video control technologies such as gamma correctable Dual Hardware Overlay support, PureVideo Preview for full-screen video playback and adjustable proc-amp controls for the video window and TV. If you are working on graphics or a wed designer, you’ll really like the Pivot mode feature that lets you spin the display from horizontal to vertical.

In addition to including the cables (DVI to Dual HD15 cable, TV-output cable - composite/s-video,  DVI to DVI + HD-15 cable,  HD-15 to YPbPr component output cable, DVI (male) to HD15 (female) adapter)  you’ll need to hook up a variety of display types, it also includes the bundled software that makes it a lot easier to set up and configure your screens in the manner you prefer.  In addition, you can use the adjustable proc-amp settings to set and control TV and overlay video window: hue, saturation, brightness and contrast in realtime for overlay video in a window and on a NTSC/TV TV monitor..

Hue lets you change the overall color tone of an image. Saturation lets you adjust the overall color purity. Brightness and contrast let you adjust the tonal range of all pixels in the image. You can also use these controls to create special effects such as black and white, in realtime.

A very cool feature is the Multi-Display Zoom that lets you view a portion of one display full-screen on the other display.

Matrox Multi-Display Zoom can give you a close-up view of any part of your desktop. You can select any region on one display and then have it zoomed so that it appears full-screen on the second display, enabling pixel-by-pixel editing. If you really need to get down into your images to do some precise editing, this is very helpful. For example, this makes it a lot easier to clean up the edges of a graphic or title for chroma keys or superimpositions.

The Parhelia’s software package includes the Matrox PowerDesk-HF utility suite, an intuitive and feature rich interface for adjusting board-level and multi-display parameters, and WYSIWYG video output plug-ins for Adobe® Premiere® Pro, Adobe After Effects®, Adobe Photoshop®, Discreet™ Combustion® 3, Discreet 3ds max™ and NewTek LightWave 3D®.  These plug-ins enable you to control and monitor the video colors and quality to make sure that what you are creating on your computer displays is accurately replicated when you output it to video. These plug-ins enable allowing an editor to output the creation full-screen on a connected video monitor from within the compositing application. 

 The Parhelia APVe is OpenGL® and Microsoft® DirectX® compliant and ships with display drivers for Microsoft Windows® XP and Windows® 2000.

More info at www.matrox.com

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