Ultrawide Monitors - Dual Screen Dilemma

Curious to know if others are suffering with me...

I have an ultra wide at home that happens to be a model that does not allow native dual screen and Resolve's dual monitor set up only works with two physical monitors, or certain ultrawide models that allow for native split screen.

Wondering if this is on BMD's radar or not. Curious if it's worth making noise, or if it has been brought up enough to be on the roadmap.

Cheers.

The point of adding another monitor is to have more screen real estate.

You don't gain that advantage by putting both 'screens' on a single monitor.

Seems like a pointless feature.

I'm not a fan of widescreen displays. I do like using two separate 27" 2K displays for GUI, which are affordable and easy to find, and supported by all recent operating systems. I use a third small display between them for 3rd-party scopes from an external computer. Some people are fine with just using the internal Resolve scopes, but to me the experience is better on 2 GUI displays.

Hi,
I love my ultrawide monitor, but yes they have to be what the class as a 'dual QHD monitor' and can be quite had to find, I finally went for the Dell U4919DW. It took a bit of setting up but love the layout now.

Damn, that's more like a Super-UltraWide, Nick. Didn't know they made those.

Now I get it.

The point of adding another monitor is to have more screen real estate.

You don't gain that advantage by putting both 'screens' on a single monitor.

Seems like a pointless feature.

Honestly, you just made absolutely no sense.
I have the same amount of pixel real estate as I did with two monitors.
Now I just have one less physical monitor, one less connection, and one less power supply.

Thanks for your opinion though.

Now that we got a bunch of personal preferences out of the way.

Does anyone know if this is something on the dev teams radar?
or know of a work around.

According to Nick, only monitors designed to do this can do this. Not a Resolve issue.

You thinking different?

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that Resolve has 2 layouts, Single and dual monitor layout. If you use 1 monitor no matter how large or wide, you can only use single monitor layout unless that monitor like the Dell (and I'm sure there are others) is designed so that it technically can be supplied 2 monitor sources, then you can use Dual monitor layout, So I'm with Marc, if you can't find something like the Dell, 2 matching monitors are the way to go, as Dual moitor layout offers so much more information at the one time, except, and I with BMD would change this and that is the cut page, only works in single monitor, but that's for another post

No I'm not thinking different, Jim. I literally stated that in the first sentence of my post. Please review it again as I'm well aware of this. There are quite a few of them, LG has models as well.

The only option it seems would be software that partitions the monitor. From some tests, it's not bad.
Thought to maybe include that in case others search the forums. There are a few.

But yest, since you seem curious, it is a Resolve issue.
The UI and UX for the program is horrible. The fact that a lot of these menu's and options don't pop out boggles a large swath of the user base.

- Key frame editing on the color page constrained to a small section?
- Track meters that slide off to the side, only come out a certain distance, and then a scroll bar?
One could go on, but I digress.

It's as if BMD had it designed to run on an iMac, and then added dual screen support down the road to please the professional crowd.

Given that each version has leaned more and more to the Prosumer crowd, I'm actually really surprised this hasn't been addressed.

Whether one monitor, two, and ultrawide... or three.

It's not a Resolve issue if the design of the monitor does not allow the operating system to treat it as 2 discrete displays.

It's not a Resolve issue if the design of the monitor does not allow the operating system to treat it as 2 discrete displays.

Yeah, that was my thinking, basked on Nick's original post.

For the GUI, I used 2 x 27" displays. The screen on top is an ultra wide connected to DeckLink mini monitor 4K for reference.

monitor.jpg (167.51 KiB) Viewed 4660 times

It's not a Resolve issue if the design of the monitor does not allow the operating system to treat it as 2 discrete displays.

That's correct as I see it. This is more of an OS issue than a Resolve issue per se. I also think you can run into performance issues by pushing too much / too fast to one monitor at a time.

We run our system like this:



I don't pretend that this configuration will work for everybody, and there are certainly people who work just fine with one GUI display. I mainly like having the Lightbox up all the time on a different display and a larger display of the Gallery, then the control window has bigger displays for tracking and so on. Scopes are immediately below the main color monitor, so I don't have to glance very far to see where we're going in terms of levels.

It's not a Resolve issue if the design of the monitor does not allow the operating system to treat it as 2 discrete displays.

Resolve. Is the only application that treats UW this way. Next to Scratch. But these are vastly different apps now.

I also think you can run into performance issues by pushing too much / too fast to one monitor at a time.

I'm curious to hear an elaboration on that, honestly. I haven't seen any statistical analysis on it, and the plethora of people playing back 4K HDR games off them makes me think it boils down to the GPU. But if you have it, I'd love to read it.
I digress..

It's not an issue, per say. It's more and more becoming a design flaw. Which again, to both of these points, I addressed in my initial post.

Resolve's not strictly a grading app anymore. It's an NLE, compositor, and a DAW wrapped into one box.
It has one the most restrictive GUI on the market, second to scratch, which again is a specialty program...

Ultrawide's are becoming more and more common across the board in both the ProSumer market and at higher levels. I've seen them on multiple productions. Maybe not at your facility, but they are easier to manage and frankly cleaner when working in say.. Media Composer, Pro Tools, etc.

I mean honestly, the only thing you can float, or change in Resolve is the scopes.. and even you are not doing that Marc.

Channels inner Bob Zelin......

Resolve is the only application that treats UW this way.

You're finding that most software can treat your single monitor as if it were two, despite Windows treating it as a single desktop?

You're finding that most software can treat your single monitor as if it were two, despite Windows treating it as a single desktop?

Based on Resolve's constrictive software design, yes. Window's has nothing do with that fact, at all.

That is a problem.

Just as the scaling issue is a problem and that's been talked about for years.

But hey... We have a second edit page, right? /s

Based on Resolve's constrictive software design, yes.

I'm confused. I wasn't asking about Resolve there, I was asking if you had other software that could treat your single monitor as two even when Windows treats it as one?

Hi all,
Ran into this post in my reseaarch for an ultrawide monitor. I'd would love to get ya'lls input, as it has been very difficult researching this topic, given that as Davinci video editors we have a very specific use case. Also, computer stores (even B&H and MicroCenter) don't keep them on display so it has been hard to get a grip on the look and feel of these monitors.

Here are some questions I have:
1. 21:9 Vs 32:9? If 21:9, what size monitor (38"? 40"?)
2. Do you have enough real estate vertically? (I typically work with 8 audio tracks and 5 video tracks).
3. How does the color accuracy compare with a iMac?
4. Any monitor recommendations? I'm looking at:

- LG 49WL95C-WE 49" 32:9 UltraWide 
- Philips 499P9H curved monitor
- SAMSUNG 49-inch Odyssey G9
- Dell UltraSharp U4919DW 49 inch Dual QHD Curved Monitor
- Asus Designo Curve MX38VC
- Dell U4021QW UltraSharp 40-inch Curved WUHD Monitor
- Dell U4919DW 49" 32:9

Thanks!

You're finding that most software can treat your single monitor as if it were two, despite Windows treating it as a single desktop?

Technically no, but practically yes, most do.. You do not get constrained in the program layout as much as resolve forces you to.

Example 1. You cannot have one side of the screen be the timeline workspace, and the other side be a video preview, as you can with dual monitors.. No other editing software I know limits you in this way. In premiere you can simply move the feed over to be on that side of the screen, but resolve stubbornly decides for you that the best location for the video preview is above the timeline. Not only is that incredibly arrogant, but also proves the point being made that it is not designed for ultrawide monitors.
For me even without having a ultrawide the location of the preview window makes it completely unusable. I always have a clean feed on the other monitor and I just make the video preview as small as I can to maximize my timeline workspace as much as I can. I wish I could disable the preview, but no Blackmagic decided for me that I need it.. Arrogance.

Had they allowed the layout of the workspace being moved around you would not have this issue.

A designer of a software should never force its users to a specific way of thinking or working. It's arrogant, narrowminded and can never take all use cases and situations into account. Oh and it also cost you nothing to do so other than your stubborn pride to be "right"