Capture cards

[snidy1]

For capturing from a digital video camera, would a capture card be better than firewire.

 

[V00D00]

Naturally it doesn't involve the i/o conversion associated with a firewire connection, and will provide considerably more bandwidth.

It really depends on how much you want to spend.

I have no idea about firewire capture devices, but I would assume that a PCI product would have more features and provide more options that would improve the overall quality.

 

[boshuter]

Originally posted by: snidy1
For capturing from a digital video camera, would a capture card be better than firewire.

It depends on the capture card..... most of the sub $100 capture/tuner cards are pretty useless. A good capture card is not cheap if you want good quality.

 

[LED]

No

 

[cryogenic666]

Firewire = 400mbps = 50MB/sec, best-case scenario. PCI = 133MB/sec spread among ALL devices attatched to it. Tough call. Some nicer capture cards can encode to MPEG in hardware if you need such capability.

 

[snidy1]

Originally posted by: cryogenic666
Some nicer capture cards can encode to MPEG in hardware if you need such capability.

What's the advantage of hardware encoding?

 

[cryogenic666]

It offloads your CPU to do other things. Without hardware encoding, the alternative is software encoding, which is handled by your CPU.

 

[tiap]

Originally posted by: snidy1
For capturing from a digital video camera, would a capture card be better than firewire.

You don't capture from a digital video camera you just transfer the data via firewire. For instance a $15.00 firewire card won't degrade your video.

But you capture analog video from various other sources and that's where the capture/encoding comes into play, whether it is by hardware or software. Analog capturing is done in real time and then the encoding is done as quickly as the cpu and software can handle it. A hardware card captures and encodes at the same time (in real time), but the great misconception here is that you won't be finished. It will still have to be re encoded again 99.9% of the time because no matter how little of an edit you do to the video, changes it.
Bottom line is the faster the processing the better.

 

[Pariah]

If you have a DV camcorder, you use firewire. If it's not, you use a capture card for analog capture. Pretty straightforward. It's not a case of which is better, they have different usages.

 

[jamesbond007]

I have a Canopus ADVC100 and I dump analoge video to my computer via FireWire through this device using WinDV to dump it. I have NO complaints as quality is incredible for the file size! It captures into straight 720x480 resolutions, never a single lost frame, no out-of-sync audio, and best of all, it takes no CPU time so I can do other things instead of using some ATi All-In-Wonder card or Leadtek capture card that takes up my CPU cycles and is all software rendered, usually creating larger files, too. The Canopus/WinDV setup dumps directly to AVI and that makes it incredibly easy to dump into pretty much any program for post-processing.

I'd have to say the best part of this whole thing is that there are no drivers to screw up the system or conflict with each other. I remember when I had my AIW Radeon 8500 and AIW Radeon 9700 Pro, there would sometimes be software issues/lockups and even dropped frames and out-of-sync audio. This was while capturing AVI at 720x480@29.97fps.

Another good feature of an external unit like my ADVC100 is that you can use it on a Mac or PC or even just keep it around when your PCI buses go bye bye and you're SOL. 😉 You can do capturing on pretty much any fire-wire enabled computer...I'd even say an 800MHz AMD/Intel machine could do just fine. Got a laptop? No worries!

I've been down many roads in the past few years and have never looked back after picking up this unit. It's the best in its class, though, I think Canopus now has some newer models out, but they are top-notch! Skip the USB capture units, though, and stick with FireWire.

My two cents.

 

1394 is better, if your dv have

 

[LED]

Assuming you have DV then stick with Firewire as no analogue device will capture it better and I dare to say that my analogue device does better with Firewire...

 

[fell8]

Hmm, your options are:

A) 1.Take a digital recording; 2.Convert it to analog; 3.Transmit the analog signal along a length of cable where interference and signal loss are a real issue; 4.Convert it back to digital; 5.Store.

B) 1.Take a digital recording; 2.Transmit it, unaltered, over a digital interface that is largely immune to noise and signal loss; 3.Store

That is a tough one. Better just pay someone to do it for you.