5 ms·

Agree, I do not understand the need for more than one monitor as your eyes can only focus on one monitor at the same time anyway. It looks cool to have a bunch

by blux 7y ago

Agree, I do not understand the need for more than one monitor as your eyes can only focus on one monitor at the same time anyway. It looks cool to have a bunch of monitors in front of you and of course eyes notice stuff going on in your peripheral vision as well but for that one could use some notifier daemon to get the same effect.

SomeGuy789 7y ago
At least one use case is typing something in one workspace while looking at another. Incredibly useful when you need to edit config files or edit specific portions of text. Since you only need the parts of where you're "copying" from typing it out is usually much faster.
- blux 7y ago
  Sounds like a sub-optimal workflow tbh. Why not copy/paste in the first place and then edit?
mroche 7y ago
Like anything else, it depends on your workflow and preferences. For those of us in Animation/VFX, it really helps having multiple monitors as we have a decent amount of windows to manage interactive graphs, timelines, viewports, outliners, render views at full resolution, reference, etc. Pixel real estate comes at a premium here, and flipping back and forth between workspaces is not efficient in this context. For some in this area a single 4K may suffice, but dual monitors of anything is usually better (for editorial and grading it's essentially a requirement as a dedicated reference monitor, with other departments like comp able to use as well).
- blux 7y ago
  I have no experience in this area, so I take your word for it. But is this not at least partly a limitation imposed by the tools you are using?
  - mroche 7y ago
    > But is this not at least partly a limitation imposed by the tools you are using? Not particularly[0]. It's more about the workflow and representation of data needed to work. To change this would require fundamentally changing the way this work is done, which I'm not sure is possible to the degree where it would make sense. All of the applications are capable of being used on a single monitor. Windows can be docked, tabbed, hidden, workspaces arranged and saved, etc. It's just that it's not as efficient to work on a single monitor as it'll require significantly more scrolling, panning, zooming in and out, and switching tabs/windows/applications than having another screen to offload and dedicate windows to with the provided real estate. Once you experience having multiple monitors for these kinds of workflows, it becomes a real bother only having access to one. It sounds superficial, but when that's what a large portion of the job entails every little bit helps. Even when I had multiple monitors, I combined that with virtual desktops to great affect to help focus what each workspace was used for (one for main 3D, one for compositing, one for texturing, etc). They work really well together. If one wished to stick with a single monitor, then using an ultra-wide would be my best recommendation. [0] There are some areas, where UI's and viewers are written with 8-bit support only, so a 10-bit secondary reference monitor to use with a dedicated output card is required when working with this kind of material 'properly' (accurately, correctly, without dithering, etc). Even when this isn't required, a second monitor is often used as a dedicated full screen viewer anyways so that an image is viewed at 1:1 in its entirety with no scaling artifacts introduced so the artist knows exactly how an image looks.
majewsky 7y ago
> your eyes can only focus on one monitor at the same time anyway True, but peripheral vision is a thing. I have Slack and stuff on a separate monitor, so I can see from the corner of my eye if there are any unreads.
- blux 7y ago
  I agree, but as I said, you can have some notification daemon or tray icon to achieve the same.

by blux 7y ago

SomeGuy789 7y ago

At least one use case is typing something in one workspace while looking at another. Incredibly useful when you need to edit config files or edit specific portions of text. Since you only need the parts of where you're "copying" from typing it out is usually much faster.

blux 7y ago
Sounds like a sub-optimal workflow tbh. Why not copy/paste in the first place and then edit?

mroche 7y ago

Like anything else, it depends on your workflow and preferences. For those of us in Animation/VFX, it really helps having multiple monitors as we have a decent amount of windows to manage interactive graphs, timelines, viewports, outliners, render views at full resolution, reference, etc. Pixel real estate comes at a premium here, and flipping back and forth between workspaces is not efficient in this context. For some in this area a single 4K may suffice, but dual monitors of anything is usually better (for editorial and grading it's essentially a requirement as a dedicated reference monitor, with other departments like comp able to use as well).

blux 7y ago
I have no experience in this area, so I take your word for it. But is this not at least partly a limitation imposed by the tools you are using?
- mroche 7y ago
  > But is this not at least partly a limitation imposed by the tools you are using? Not particularly[0]. It's more about the workflow and representation of data needed to work. To change this would require fundamentally changing the way this work is done, which I'm not sure is possible to the degree where it would make sense. All of the applications are capable of being used on a single monitor. Windows can be docked, tabbed, hidden, workspaces arranged and saved, etc. It's just that it's not as efficient to work on a single monitor as it'll require significantly more scrolling, panning, zooming in and out, and switching tabs/windows/applications than having another screen to offload and dedicate windows to with the provided real estate. Once you experience having multiple monitors for these kinds of workflows, it becomes a real bother only having access to one. It sounds superficial, but when that's what a large portion of the job entails every little bit helps. Even when I had multiple monitors, I combined that with virtual desktops to great affect to help focus what each workspace was used for (one for main 3D, one for compositing, one for texturing, etc). They work really well together. If one wished to stick with a single monitor, then using an ultra-wide would be my best recommendation. [0] There are some areas, where UI's and viewers are written with 8-bit support only, so a 10-bit secondary reference monitor to use with a dedicated output card is required when working with this kind of material 'properly' (accurately, correctly, without dithering, etc). Even when this isn't required, a second monitor is often used as a dedicated full screen viewer anyways so that an image is viewed at 1:1 in its entirety with no scaling artifacts introduced so the artist knows exactly how an image looks.

majewsky 7y ago

> your eyes can only focus on one monitor at the same time anyway True, but peripheral vision is a thing. I have Slack and stuff on a separate monitor, so I can see from the corner of my eye if there are any unreads.

blux 7y ago
I agree, but as I said, you can have some notification daemon or tray icon to achieve the same.