Is anyone using 3 monitors? I am thinking of this combination: 18" WACOM Cintiq touch screen, 19"LCD and a larger LCD plus a Protools keyboard (in the long run it seems worth the extra money not to have to flip through a pile of notes to find often useful but obscure keyboard shortcuts) and a multibutton trackball. This all needs to be 50 ft. away from the computers (a 9600-300 MHz, a 1.25 G4 and an SNS A/V SAN in the machine room with my 4kVa UPS and furman balanced power conditioning)I need to control both computers from the remote location ((?)maybe just the G4).
The Cintiq would replace the fader part of a control surface, the 17" would display all my utility screens and the large monitor would display the edit screen.
My wife always touches the screen to demonstrate a particular informatic routine, it's become natural for human beings to have physical contact with the images on the screen.
How can I have 3 monitors, 1 of them being a touch screen?
Is there anyone who already does this, at least with 3 monitors? What video card do I buy, is there a 3 output video card? With HD3 and FibreChannel I'm short on PCI slots. If I'm playing movies or video, I'll do it with the 9600 and Gallery Virtual VTR or something more convenient if I can find it.
Another question: After hearing stories of people not being able to find their cursors, is there a way to dedicate a certain input device to a particular screen (ie. touchscreen is safe from trackball, trackball 1 works only on screen 2 and track ball 2 works only on screen 3? etc... o simile...
thanks

7rojo7 asked:
>>>Is anyone using 3 monitors?<<<

I tried using three 18" TFTs with my Dual G4 (mirror doors) which works fine except my PT Mix is running with a lot of errors then.
So I only use two TFTs.
On one PC I have three TFTs connected under Win2K without ill effects. This machine runs WaveLab and Pinguin Audio Meter Pro.
All these screens are not touch screens.

Matrox ( http://www.matrox.com/ ) offers three and four display video cards. No idea about Mac support though. Do you need all three monitors on one computer, or are you using three monitors spread between two computers? There's a big difference.

Has anyone seen this guys studio? :

http://www.conscioussound.com/index.htm

It looks pretty cool if kind of crazy. I'm wondering what it's like to use.

I'm on PC and running Paris, so apply whatever may be useful from this info to your scenario.

I've run 4 monitors for about the last 4 years. Currently, 4 x 18" NEC LCDs at 1280 x 1024. Not a problem on Windows, and I suspect it will not be a problem on OSX. OS9 seems to choke a bit on multiple monitors. OSX should be fine, but the challenge will be getting the drivers written by the manufacturers. At this point, I use 2 MAtrox G450 dualheads, though I have also used rather exotic 4 output video cards in the past. PC only, unfortunately for Mac users.

How useful 3 or 4 monitors are depends directly on the app. On Paris all windows open as floats and operate completely independently, so 4 monitors is extremely useful. Logic would be similar. PT a bit less so.

As far as touchscreens. I scoped that out about a year ago. I had a 20" LCD touchscreen working in conjunction with 3 other monitors. Worked as advertised, and I was able to directly move faders, mute, solo, etc on the screen since Paris sports a fairly large and realistic mixer screen with large buttons and faders. I had even gone so far as to design a custom console to accomodate the touchscreen as a worksurface. Very high "Wow" factor.

BUT , the resolution, at least on the touchscreens at that point, was insufficient to really work well for a DAW, even one as realistically emulated onscreen as Paris, which has much larger onscreen controls than PT. Just a little too coarse resolution to be able to move as fast and precisely as I wanted. And 1 out of 10 times hitting the same spot was a near miss on the desired control. Parallax error is unavoidable to some degree. Not quite ready for DAW primetime, IMO.

The Wacom, I don't know. The idea of a stylus is unappealing to me, personally. I estimate we are likely 1-3 years from the touchscreen we would want for a DAW, and ideally the app iteslf would be optimized for touchscreen, with a specific "Fat Channel" mode with appropriate sized graphics.

That's my take on it. No Wacom or touchscreen in my shop yet.


Regards,
Brian T

Thanks alot everyone for your informative responses. I truly appreciate them.