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[mindracing]

I'm building a new system primarily for editing video.

What recommendations do you have for video capture cards.

Thanks in anticipation.

Ash

[Chris Shaw]

Depends on your budget. I know a lot of professionals who swear by these

http://www.aja.com/

In combination with a G5 Mac and Final Cut Pro, you get 10bit uncompressed video for a few thousand dollars. If you're on a smaller budget, and are willing to put up with some compression artifacts, I'd go with one of these

http://www.miglia.com/products/video/director2/

but still with FCP.

[mindracing]

Thanks. Looks like a good option.

[Robert Taylor]

Are you talking about capturing digital video (ie. from a digital video camera), or analogue (Composite or S-Video)? A lot of motherboards these days come with on-board firewire (IEEE1394) ports which your digital camera plugs straight into. If not using a digital camera, then you could buy a TV tuner card which includes an S-Video or composite video IN.

Digital obviously is much better quality wise than analogue capturing.

I can put my digital camera in "AV converter mode", whereby it takes Composite or S-Video output from a VCR (for example), and converts it into digital "on the fly", thus allowing you to capture using Firewire.

If you don't have on board firewire, or dont wanna buy a new motherboard, you can get PCI firewire cards VERY cheap ($50 here in AUS).

There's a whole plethora (I've been waiting to use that word all week!!), of software to use for video editing. Often, you will get some form of video edit software if you buy a firewire card, or get a mobo with onboard firewire, but this software is often rubbishy low-end stuff.

Let me know if you're interested and I can give you a rundown on some of the stuff I've tried.

[Chris Shaw]

Digital obviously is much better quality wise than analogue capturing.

This isn't necessarily true. At the low end, DV camcorders usually give better results than analogue, but DV video is heavily compressed. Sharp edges or smooth gradients suffer badly under DV compression. If you're looking for better quality, particularly for doing video effects like chromakey, a good capture card taking component video from a good source will give much better results than DV.
If your footage is already on DV, of course, an all digital pipeline means it won't degrade any further. It basically depends on your source material.

[Robert Taylor]

I stand humbly corrected...

[mindracing]

Well, that's opened things up a bit.

I do need to capture from MiniDV so firwire is the obvious route.

I also need to capture from S Video or composite.

Which graphic card would you suggest for this - rather than go for a dedicated capture card?

[Robert Taylor]

Well...If you have a MiniDV (Sony?) camera, hopefully the camera has the ability to act as a go-between for your analogue sources (composite & S-Video).

If that's the case, you can just hook up your MiniDV cam via firewire. All you need in that case is a firewire card.

If you can't do that, then there are a PLETHORA of hardware devices out there to capture your analogue video. There's ones that do it via USB, firewire, PCI cards etc etc. Best bet is to do some web searching looking for sites which dish out advice about DV / PC editing (making sure they're not trying to push any particular product!!). There are definately some good ones around...(these may or may not be though!!)

http://www.computervideo.net/
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/
http://www.marcpeters.co.uk/videoeditingforum/specs009.htm

And for something completely different (warning this has rude noises):
http://www.limmy.com/playthings/xylophone/