Which capture card to buy.....??

Bushido Philosopher · Post by **Bushido Philosopher** » Sat Dec 21, 2002 10:40 pm

OK, I think I'll finally buy a video capture card. Problem is I have no idea which one to pick.

So I need a little help on decision factors like how reliable is it? or is it compatible with Premiere 6.5? or how good is the capture? etc etc.

I saw one of those Pinnacle cards and the thing was like as much as Premiere!! I don't think I'll wanna go THAT high in price, but if it's for good reason, then I might.

Thanks for the help.

madmallard · Post by **madmallard** » Wed Dec 25, 2002 8:38 pm

almost 300 posts and not capture carded?

believe it or not, whatever pinnacle card you were looking at was one of the cheaper ones.

as far as premier, if you're using a PC, then premier sees any capture device if it is a windows multimedia accesable capture device.

two choices, internal and external

Internal are pretty much capture cards.

External includes firewire vcrs, camcorders, converter boxes for firewire, and usb devices.

Bushido Philosopher · Post by **Bushido Philosopher** » Thu Dec 26, 2002 4:12 pm

oh wow, im up to 300 already?

well damn, if that's one of Pinnacle's cheaper ones then I think I'd die if I saw the expensive ones.

Knowname · Post by **Knowname** » Sat Jan 04, 2003 2:17 pm

Ko Oh Yoku wrote:OK, I think I'll finally buy a video capture card. Problem is I have no idea which one to pick.

So I need a little help on decision factors like how reliable is it? or is it compatible with Premiere 6.5? or how good is the capture? etc etc.

I saw one of those Pinnacle cards and the thing was like as much as Premiere!! I don't think I'll wanna go THAT high in price, but if it's for good reason, then I might.

Thanks for the help.

Idunno where you heard that was one of Pinnacles cheaper ones (maybe the post b4... don't bug me I gotta headache ;-p)

anyway pinnacle makes both analogue (ghetto) and DV cards if you mean this' a cheap DV card than that's beleivable... Analogue cards are sufficiant for stuff like gettin your stuff from vhs, laserdisc or some non-demanding archiving off tv my analogue card comes from Iomagic but it is made by Pinnacle (even still says Pinnacle on it), according to Dscaler it IS a Pinnacle card lol. Anyway it is only like $20... but if you wanna be anal about it (don't wanna rip from your DVD drive or just need awesome quality captures) than you get DV wich, as you found out, costs $300+.

madmallard · Post by **madmallard** » Sat Jan 04, 2003 5:01 pm

people seem to forget. . .its not easy for a computer, even todays computers, to just push through the amount of data required to generate an NTSC broadcast signal.

mpeg2 has probably been one of the best overall quality vs space payoff solutions ever.

DV is not

MJPEG is not.

there was no way a computer from 10 years ago could've handled full video without a)compression, b)clustering or multithreading, c) daughterboard.

Knowname · Post by **Knowname** » Sun Jan 05, 2003 4:08 am

so your saying, good DV-type capture card would need a really good machine and/ or RAID or SCSI??

Org Profile · Post by **Vlad G Pohnert** » Sun Jan 05, 2003 6:33 am

sixstop wrote:people seem to forget. . .its not easy for a computer, even todays computers, to just push through the amount of data required to generate an NTSC broadcast signal.

mpeg2 has probably been one of the best overall quality vs space payoff solutions ever.

DV is not

MJPEG is not.

Yes, somewhat true but your statement is very misleading.

Mjpeg was used for Analog capture cards and can be compressed. Basically quality depended on compression, but it compressed below 3, then quality is outstanding (blows Mpeg2 away) but at the cost of space
lots op space.

DV is a 5:1 compression format. Yes it take up more space, but it can be edited in real time and not as lossless as Mpeg2. This is the format of choice for most video editing cards! Your statement I would say if not quite true...

Mpeg2. You can't edit it in it's native authored format. Must use a version such as Mpeg2-I (I frame) or something like the DC2000 uses (much larger files sizes). Yes, it's a great quality vs space for authoring (output) format, but not a good idea to keep your masters in. More for distribution on discs, etc.

Vlad

Org Profile · Post by **Vlad G Pohnert** » Sun Jan 05, 2003 6:38 am

Knowname wrote:so your saying, good DV-type capture card would need a really good machine and/ or RAID or SCSI??

No true at all!

Todays computers and IDE drives have no problem at all editing in DV. Most cards are even dual stream (Pinnacle DV500, Matrox RT2500, etc) and that is no problem for a IDE ATA 100+ drive to keep up with.

Best is to get a computer system like a P4 with atleast 0.5 gig ram. Always use a sperate Hard Drive(s) for video capture/editing from your system drive and you'll be fine...

Vlad

Org Profile · Post by **VicBond007** » Sun Jan 05, 2003 11:33 pm

You want to sell your soul to Pinnacle. My dv500 is unquestionably the greatest investment I ever made.

There's nothing wrong with analog capturing Knowname. Do you know what every television studio in America still uses? Do you think everything is DV and firewire? I laugh at that openly. Analog, if done right, is godlike. Look at Laserdisc. It runs circles around DVD and it's craptacular compression. But enough about that...

The DV500 will capture to Dual stream DV. IIRC, it's got two little processing units on it, and each one handles a field. DV rendering is handled on the card so it's of little relevence what CPU you have, so long as it's fast enough to keep up with the massive amount of data (and tv-out requires a good 500MHz). The main bottleneck is HD speed, and even that is really a myth. Back in the day I ran a test capture of the 1-hour long "This is Otakudom" through my DV500, onto a UDMA66 5400RPM HD. The entire thing captured in full without skipping a beat (NTFS partition of course, otherwise it'd crash the moment it hit 4GB). And if you've got DV devices lying around the house you want to put to use, the DV500 has 2 firewire ports built right in, and comes with great software to control the device and pull the clips automatically.

A cheaper solution would be to go for the DC30, which is essentially the same card, except it works in mjpeg instead of dv2. Theoretically it's lossy, but it's completely unnoticeable. I do not know if it has firewire ports or not and am too lazy to look.

Org Profile · Post by **Vlad G Pohnert** » Sun Jan 05, 2003 11:47 pm

No, The DC30 is all analog. I still have my DC50 which is the same card but with Component video as well. And yes I agree that there is nothing wrong with analog caputure. I dod quite a few videos with my DC50 and they actually turned out in terms of quality much better in some cases then what I do in DV.... Basically, If I used a 1:2.5 compression ration, the quality was compatible with Beta SP, the still King of broadcast....

Vlad

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Which capture card to buy.....??

Which capture card to buy.....??

Re: Which capture card to buy.....??