Pro Audio Support

Q:
How to use a Matrox G450 with dual monitors in Pro Tools 5.3.x Windows (LE, TDM or HD).
 
A:
In order to use Quicktime in Pro Tools PC with a dual monitor support on a Matrox g450, at the present time, the following steps need to be followed. The crucial changes for Pro Tools that deviate from the default g450 driver are as follows.Pro Tools requires your dual monitor desktop to use the same resolution and color palette for both displays. Essentially this makes your Windows operating system think of the dual monitors as one really big monitor.1. Go the Maxtrox website (matrox.com) and download both the most recent (non-beta) drivers (currently w2k584.exe) and the uninstall utility mentioned (pd_unin201.exe). Just download them, do not run either at this point.2. When the downloads are complete, go to your Add Remove Programs and look to see if you have a "Matrox Graphics Software (remove only)" listing.3. If you see such a listing uninstall it.4. If you do not see such a listing run unzip the pd_unin201.exe zip file and run pdunist.exe (the default location for this would be c:\mgafold\unin_201 unless you changed it).5. You will be prompted to reboot. Please note you will reboot (just this once) into 640x480 resolution and 16 color mode which will look terrible. It's only going to be that way for a minute.6. As soon as you can see your desktop and find the w2k584.exe (or whatever current file) double click it to extract it's contents.7. Go to the location of the extraction (it defaults to c:\mgafold\w2k584 if you don't change it) and double click Setup.exe8. Click Continue through the Introductory, Disclaimer and Language selections screens until you get to the end.9. Reboot when prompted.10. When you come back around to the desktop next, up comes the crucial step: A dialog from Matrox will come up. (Ignore the message from Windows emanating from the Notification Windows the bottom right corner of the desktop)11. Choose "Use Dual Head"12. Change to "Same resolution and color palette for both displays." Please note the default selection is not the correct one for our uses.13. You are ready to go. To check / change your desktop size, right click on the desktop, choose properties, choose settings. You should see the picture of one monitor not two represent. You should be able to set resolutions (depending on your monitor) of up to 3600 and 1440.We also highly recommend Quicktime 6. PC playback performance is vastly improved for software codec .mpeg, .avi and .mov files. Quicktime 5 already had great DV playback for us and DV performance in 6 remains near flawless.If Quicktime 6 had shipped just a few week earlier we would have officially qualified it for all Pro Tools 5.3 releases.These notes apply to all branches of Pro Tools, and though the specifics of these steps will vary from video card to video card, this same process, generally speaking, will be necessary for any video cards attempting to use QuickTime PC in Pro Tools 5.3.x.