video capture cards

irishgeo

i am looking for some advice on vidoe capture cards.

i am looking into purchasing one for my video camera which has a DV output.

What other forms of video camera outputs is there?

I would be looking to use this in a small video editing business. I would be looking for a cheap card which can connect to as many standards as possible.

I have a CDRW so creating Video CDs is easy.

If if wanted to create a VCR tape is it possible to record off my DVD player to my video player.

Thanks for any advice.

Michael Collins

If your camera has DV (i'm assuming iLink aka Firewire) output you don't need a capture card. All you want is a Firewire card and a good video editing suit. I'm not sure what's good these days but I used to use Ulead Video Studio 5 which was alright.

tman

chances are the video camera will have an analogue video + sound out, it should be a piece of piss to just connect it to your vcr via that (you may need to get a scart converty thingy)
you should also be able to plug the video feed into the vivo port on your graphics card if it has one

ozmo

Originally posted by irishgeo
i am looking for some advice on vidoe capture cards.

i am looking into purchasing one for my video camera which has a DV output.

What other forms of video camera outputs is there?

I would be looking to use this in a small video editing business. I would be looking for a cheap card which can connect to as many standards as possible.

I have a CDRW so creating Video CDs is easy.

If if wanted to create a VCR tape is it possible to record off my DVD player to my video player.

Thanks for any advice.

* Get a cheap Firewire card off internet- about 25 euros - they are all the same quality.
(remember you need a firewire cable also). Newer motherboards, PC's and even some Soundcards give you this built in.
Or buy it in a box from PC World/maplin with software for a quite expensive price of 100 plus euro.

* For a non-digital camera you would need a video capture card - there are really cheap ones but avoid these as the colours and stability of picture will be bad.

* Some good software:
Dazzle - some of their stuff is quite good,
Ulead (MediaStudio - Videostudio) - Cheap and quite good - but save your work often
Adobe Premier- The best, Professional but expensive, MGIVideoWave- Looks good, but a bit shallow on features.
Free WinXP built in Video Editor - Actually not too bad for home use if you download the latest version - or apply the service pack to winxp. Very simple and can produce standard .dv files. But cannot do some basic stuff like sound editing.

Avoid Sonic's Stuff - really awful.

* Try working to a DVD medium. Its much easier once you edit one DVD to make copies (eg. Weddings etc) And the quality is far better.

* You need to download all your tape to PC to edit.
Files are huge - 15minutes = 4GB
With almost all software this must be done in 15minute chunks or
else they crash (even on WinXP NTFS system)
* Then you edit. A compile takes a couple hours and generates another 4GB per 15 minutes.
* To put to tape - you then download this file back to the Camera and play the camera to the video. The Camera will come with cables to connect it to the VCR. Try not do do much work with the Camera at this stage (not too much FF or REW or running off lots of copies) as the cameras are generally fragile and cannot stand up to mass production of tapes.

good luck...
ozmo.