External TV for FCE4

[Mary H]

Hi, I am trying to set up a TV as an output video monitor to view my FCE4 movie as I am creating it.

The diagram I have tells me to set it up through the video camera and the Firewire. When we were shopping for a camcorder, we asked about firewire cameras and were told the selection was poor because it has USB and the HDSD card can be read by a reader and so firewire was no longer the standard. So our camera has no firewire.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any kind of connections that do not require firewire. So is this possible to do.

We tried connecting the video camera through the USB port but it is not recognized by FCE4.

Any suggestions are useful.

Thanks, Mary

 

[spinnerlys]

Firewire is required for streaming video, USB doesn't support streaming of video from DV cameras.

You could get the mini DVI / DVI / mini Display Port to Video adapter, depending on the Mac you have.

You then connect the TV to this adapter via Composite (yellow RCA cable) or S-Video (black cable with pins), and select the TV as an external display in System Preferences > Displays (by deselecting Mirror Display in Arrangement).

If the TV has other inputs like VGA / HDMI / DVI you can get appropriate adapters for this too and also select them as external displays.

In FCE go to View > Video Playback and choose one of the options. You might have to try several. (Note: I only had FCP at hand, so I don't know if FCE has the function hidden there, as the manual is quite a clusterfox).

 

[Mary H]

Thanks, at least we now know what we need to do.