ScopeBox

Excuse me while I point out a cool looking production tool. It's a new program called ScopeBox. It basically is the Mac version of DV Rack (now owned by Adobe.) ScopeBox will take an input from a camera and acts like a field montior, a vectorscope, and a waveform monitor. It also does other things with the signal, like RGB parade, audio meters, and it will record direct to your hard drive. There's a DV version on sale for $299 until 1/15--that's $100 off the normal price. There's a HD version too, but unfortunately no HDV support yet. A free trial version is available. Here's a hands-on review of ScopeBox that I found at DVGuru.com.

In the free category there's a simple DV monitoring app called FlipFlop that will display a DV input from firewire (no HDV support either.) Of course you can always just use Final Cut's Capture window to do some monitoring on a computer.