Source Monitor and Program Monitor overview

The Source Monitor plays back individual clips. In the Source Monitor, you prepare clips that you want to add to a sequence by specifying In and Out points and the clip’s source tracks (audio or video). You can also insert clip markers and add clips to a sequence in a Timeline panel.

The Program Monitor plays back the sequence of clips that you are assembling. It’s your view of the active sequence in a Timeline panel. You can set sequence markers and specify a sequence’s In and Out points, which define where frames are to be added or removed from the sequence.

Each monitor contains both a time ruler and controls to play back and cue the current frame of a source clip or sequence.

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Source Monitor (left) and Program Monitor (right)

Set display quality

You can reduce the resolution of the Source Monitor and Program Monitor to decrease the processing demands on your computer. Reducing the quality setting of the Program Monitor may allow your system to create real-time previews of parts of the sequence that would otherwise require rendering.

 In the Source Monitor or Program Monitor panel menu, choose a quality setting:

For sequences based on editing modes other than RED Cinema, select one of the following:

Highest Quality
Displays video in the monitor at full resolution.

Draft Quality
Displays video in the monitor at one-half standard-definition resolution, or one-quarter resolution for drafts of HD clips.

Automatic Quality
Measures playback performance and dynamically adjusts quality.
Note: All quality settings use a bilinear pixel resampling method to resize the video image. For exporting a sequence, a cubic resampling method (which is superior to bilinear) is used.

For sequences based on the RED Cinema editing mode, select one of the following:

  • Full Resolution

  • Half Resolution

  • Quarter Resolution

  • Eighth Resolution

  • Sixteenth Resolution

    Note: Use the fractional resolution options for editing RED footage, when the RED plug-in is installed.

Change magnification

The Source Monitor and Program Monitor scale video to fit into the available area. You can change the magnification setting for each view to see the video in more detail, or to increase the size of the pasteboard area around the image (to adjust motion effects more easily, for example).

  1. Choose a magnification setting from the View Zoom Level menu (to the right of the current time display) in the Source Monitor or Program Monitor.

    In the Source Monitor, percentage values refer to the size of the source media. In the Program Monitor, percentage values refer to the image size specified by the sequence settings. Fit scales the video to fit in the monitor’s available viewing area.

  2. To change the visible area of a monitor, use the monitor’s scroll bars to change the visible area of the video image. Scroll bars appear when the current size of the monitor can’t contain the entire image.