With yet another move in the offing, I’ve been scanning gear closets and shelves for liquidation sale or re-store candidates, at the same time trying to streamline my video production workflow … which might benefit from additions. Perhaps, if I can make a buck or two from surplus gear, I might rationalize such expenses.
A minor “want” is a second monitor for use with Final Cut Pro, to move various elements of the interface — timeline, viewers, or browser — off the main screen. It’s a simple matter, once the second screen is in place, to choose from the main menu Window/Show in Secondary Display, then the element you want to appear there. Voila! Your choice appears on the adjacent display. Make sure to check the Arrangement in System Preferences/Displays.
For a while after I fled Windows-based PCs to Mac computers (in 2007), I kept an old PC around to run a couple of programs and devices I still relied on, such as a Canoscan 4000 film scanner. When that suffered a final blue screen, my father, having bought an iMac himself, gave me his Compaq Presario and LCD monitor. That PC is now a doorstop. It and the 17″Acer monitor have been gathering sawdust in my workshop (featured in my video on acoustic panels) for 3 years, and several years more in a closet in my last studio.
Why, it finally dawned on me, couldn’t I use that monitor as a second screen? I just needed to adapt the old VGA connector to USB. Was there such a thing? A search of several electronics stores finally turned up a mini display port to VGA adapter specifically for Mac, which plugs into a Thunderbolt port on the (late 2012) iMac. Bingo! A budget dual screen editing arrangement.
While the old Acer display isn’t suitable for critical work like colour grading, it’s fine for the media browser. I was initially thrilled how the curser crosses from screen to screen and media can be dragged from the secondary monitor over to the timeline. How cool is that!?
An Acer AL 1706 can be picked up on, say, ebay for CA$50-75. The short video tutorial above describes the setup process.