Capture card suggestions

[Scottness]

I'm thinking of buying a capture card - what I'm looking for is Firewire in/out and analog video in/out (stereo rca sockets) - it'd have to be Windows Xp and Adobe Premiere compatable -- any suggestions (the less expensive the better!)

Scot M

[calgodot]

One of the best sites for information, and also some pretty decent deals on stuff, is "The Electronic Mailbox," a.k.a. VideoGuys. Their capture card matrix is a ecellent graphical way of seeing which cards are compatible and comparing the features each offers. The url:

http://www.videoguys.com/vidcap.htm

The card you're looking for is not going to be very cheap: good combo cards (digital & analog) start at around $300, and the best average $500. Of course, some of the more expensive ones are also real-time, which greatly reduces the amount of time you spend sipping coffee while waiting for a render to finish.

Your cheapest bet would be to see if you can input analog video to your camcorder. Most consumer models do not have composite or s-video inputs. Some pro-sumer models offer inputs that will allow you to transfer old footage onto the DV tape, and then via firewire to your computer.

Don't scoff at this last suggesiton - I had a friend who was all set to buy a combo card for $500, just to get all his old Hi8 and SVHS footage into digital. Until I noticed that his $4000 DVcam would take S-video in. Problem solved with no further expenditures.

[roxics]

The last suggestion is a good one in my opinion.

You can get yourself a $50 firewire card that will work fine with most NLE's like Premiere 6, Vegas Video 3 and Avid 3.5. The cheapest DV camera that offers anolog in that I know of is the Sony TRV900. The Canon GL1(XM1 european), GL2, Sony's VX2000, PD100, PD150 will all do anolog input. I believe the VX2000 and PD150 will do analog in on the fly so you don't have to record to tape first.

But if you don't own one of these camera's or planning to buy one anyway then they would be an expensive alternative.

I don't know about any of the digital 8 cameras.

[wahiba]

This is a good site for checking out video related items:
http://www.vcdhelp.com/

[Scottness]

Thanks for this guys - sorry I've taken so long to reply, given I posted the original question -- anyway my situation is a little bit diferent to most I suppose - I don't own a camcorder and have been relying on friends to get my telecined footage in via a firewire port -- but anyway the firewire card was a cheap one - and I can't seem to capture or export footage in and out - although I have all other controls over the camera as it is -- and what I'm mainly looking at doing now is exporting sections of In My Image for various people to look at - and we would have done this by going back into miniDV then into a vcr for a vhs tape -- but since my firewire card is playing up I thought why not get a new card which does both, and allows me to plug directly into my vcr -- the rough cut is almost finished (will have it done in the next few datys) and I want to send it to the composer etc -- so anyway I'm going to do some more research and check out some shops in the next few days and hopefully will have bought something soon

thanks for the advice

Scot

[mattias]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=2 face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><table border="0" width="90%" bgcolor="#333333" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0"><tr><td width="100%"><table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" bgcolor="#FF9900"><tr><td width="100%" bgcolor="#DDDDDD"><font size=2 face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Of course, some of the more expensive ones are also real-time, which greatly reduces the amount of time you spend sipping coffee while waiting for a render to finish.</font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></BLOCKQUOTE>

beware that you often still have to render for digital output, since many of the realtime cards only provide an analog out "preview".

/matt