Video Playback for mac book pro based system

[masterboyle]

Hi,
I'm trying to do a short film for a friend at home. My idea was to use my mac book pro, with mini display port to DVI adapter feeding an external display for my edit window, then use the laptop screen for video playback. Problem is the video card when trying to drive two monitors seems to make Pro Tools very sluggish. If I close the laptop display and run in "Clamshell" mode the system response is fine but i have little screen real estate for the video. Any ideas? Any external firewire or USB video boxes I could use to run another monitor or even small TV set for video playback?

[DJ Insomaniac]

What model MacBook Pro are you using? I run my system like this and it's never been bogged down.

[masterboyle]

13 inch MBP mid 2009 I think.
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53 GHz, 4GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M VRAM (Total): 256 MB

[DJ Insomaniac]

Interesting. What format is the video? Some codecs will require more power to decode than others. It may also be worth getting some more RAM, just to help overall system responsiveness.

[masterboyle]

It is an h264 roughly half size from hd. Don't have exact pixel dimensions right now cause I'm not in front of my computer. 23.98 frame rate. Interestingly enough I have seen issues w 23.98 h264 exported from final cut before. In a session with only the video and guide audio track when making an edit selection there would be noticeable lag before PT would highlight the correct area. For this project I noticed that prolem with the editors H264 ref so I used QuickTime 7 pro to re-export w same settings and it seemed to fix it. Although now I still have the two monitor sluggishness mentioned in my original post.

[scottgreiner]

I think H264 is a rather processor-intensive codec. Try another codec like DVCpro and see if it's happier.

[spoons]

I work with this set-up when i'm out of the studio. works fine if you use DV codec. You could also try video on an external FW drive and audio on internal but to be honest it doesn't seem to make that much difference to me.