video capture cards

[MovieStuff]

Some of the NLE systems promote Windows 2000 compatibility, but I would steer clear of it, personaly. A few of my colleagues have tried and found it too buggy for video work. I use NT on my sytem and have found it to be incredibly stable. Also, with NT you don't have to have hardware to synch your drives in a RAID set up as NT will do that for you, as long as you're using SCSI. One colleague uses Windows 98 and IDE drives, but he's using a special board that operates in the DV codec excusively. I don't know which it is, but I'll see if I can find out. He said it wasn't very expensive and seems to be getting okay results. Ultimately, unless you computer is several years old, I don't see any reason that you can't expand it to fit the needs of what ever board you choose. I say this simply because you have already narrowed down the prospective boards by saying you don't have much money. Therefore, any capture board and associated hardare you can afford shouldn't put too much of a demand on your system or your pocket book. But I would be ready for some long nights debugging.

Funny thing; a few months back a newbie-editor with no NLE experience was interested in buying my entire NLE system. He was in a hurry because he had already signed a deal to produce a local TV show and needed to hit the ground running.

I gave him a price and he replied,"That much? Why should I pay that much for your system when I can go buy a one new for the same price?"

And I replied,"Because mine will work and the new one won't."

I decided I really didn't want to sell my system and start over, but he did take my advice and bought a used system that was already up and running.

I know you probably don't have pressing deadlines like this guy, but don't underestimate the time necessary to debug.

Roger

[Alex]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Courier, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by MovieStuff:


I gave him a price and he replied,"That much? Why should I pay that much for your system when I can go buy a one new for the same price?"

And I replied,"Because mine will work and the new one won't."

I decided I really didn't want to sell my system and start over, but he did take my advice and bought a used system that was already up and running.

I know you probably don't have pressing deadlines like this guy, but don't underestimate the time necessary to debug.

Roger<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


Yes, that is exactly the realty up above...

Plan B is to find someone with the EXACT SAME SYSTEM you want to get, do a very small video job with them, pay them to do it and sit in on the session.

Not only do you see how the system works, but if you like it, you have a built in tech help support!

-Alex




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[Martin M]

How fast is your computer ? Premiere 6.0 works with simple and cheap OHCI cards for the firewire interface. I Think you'll find more info here :
www.abcd.com www.dv.com


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[Martin M]

How fast is your computer ? Premiere 6.0 works with simple and cheap OHCI cards for the firewire interface. I Think you'll find more info here :
www.abcd.com www.dv.com


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[MadFor3D]

I would reccommend a DPS PVR card. I bought mine new and it was expensive, $2000. And it needs a dedicated SCSI drive. However, I recently saw an earlier version of the same basic card on ebay that sold for $127 or so. The nice things I like about it are- component inputs. also, you can back up your movies as .pvd files which take up less space than the bitmap image sequences/MOV's and when you re-load them to the PVR's SCSI there is no loss in image quality.

-M

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