question about hardware for video editing

[gelos]

My next project will be converting some old vhs tapes to DVD.
Current system:
1ghz athlon thunderbird
abit kt7a motherboard
radeon LE video card
768mb PC133 ram
20gb hard drive for os
40gb hard drive for files (both mostly full)

I was thinking about buying two hard drives and the 3ware 7000-2 hardware raid card to do IDE RAID 0.
I also need a video capture card of some sort.

Is the RAID 0 worth the expense or should I just get one large hard drive? What hard drives do you recommend? Is there much of a difference between the 2mb and 8mb cache? I was thinking around 200gb total hard drive space.

What capture card do you recommend? I'd like to create as high a quality as possible for the end result.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

 

[StraightPipe]

The ATI AIW's are good cards. I'd get 128RAM on it.

ALso are you planing on doing this as a business or just for home vids? if just for you dont mess w/ raid,
I would get a smaller drive (10-30G) that is fast (7200+) for recording onto. then a larger slow drive 5400+ to store it. also CD's + DVD's work pretty well for storage. DVD burner might be worth consideration instead of 200GB HD.

 

[beatle]

I swear you have just about the same system that I do.

I use an Asus TV Tuner and it does an excellent job of capturing in mpeg2, high bitrate. I'm very satisfied with it. I use the software that comes with it to do the capturing (PowerVCR II) and cutting (PowerDirector). I then use Tmpeg to encode to SVCD. FAST harddrives will help. I don't have much of a problem capturing, but the cutting can take quite a while on my old 60GXP. I store my movies on a "big" 5400 rpm WD drive.

I tried raid 0, but I didn't notice any real world performance difference. Even high bitrate mpeg2 doesn't require that much speed, less than a meg per second.

 

[vegetation]

I'll second the ASUS tv tuner! It's a great card with decent software to get you up and going immediately. Since encoding can be done in real time, there no need for any silly raid configuration either.

 

[gelos]

Thanks a lot, very helpful.

This is for personal use. These are actually home videos of my family when I was young.

I am considering a DVD burner also for the final result so it can be played on a DVD player. We have one at work that we don't use much that I can borrow.

The reason I was thinking about a large raid 0 drive was for the speed and space. If just one drive will work that'll save me some money.

I'll check out the Asus card as well.