Capture Card or Not?? NB

[Byrd2a]

I am new to digital video editing and have a question about capture cards. I am editing currently with Pinnacle Studio 8 deluxe and am capturing from Sony TRV-27 to an ATA133 7200 rpm HD via pinnacle firewire card. My system is Athlon XP 1900, 512MB Corsair PC2700 DDR, Radeon 7500, Windows XP. Will I get a boost in quality of video or improved rendering times if I get a dedicated video capture card? Any insight into the benefits of using a video capture card would be appreciated.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Originally posted by: Byrd2a
I am new to digital video editing and have a question about capture cards. I am editing currently with Pinnacle Studio 8 deluxe and am capturing from Sony TRV-27 to an ATA133 7200 rpm HD via pinnacle firewire card. My system is Athlon XP 1900, 512MB Corsair PC2700 DDR, Radeon 7500, Windows XP. Will I get a boost in quality of video or improved rendering times if I get a dedicated video capture card? Any insight into the benefits of using a video capture card would be appreciated.

Increase in quality? No. The quality of the video is totally dependent on the camera. You can improve your render times by either purchasing a cap card or buy purchasing an NLE that has RT elements(Vegas Video and I think Premiere 6.5). Both ways have their ups and their downs.

For more info on hardware:
Matrox
Canopus

 

[Duvie]

Hmmmm.....I thought I have heard that software encoding can suffer the quality of video, but that may have to do with its specific codec and software coding....

Otherwise I had a hardware and a software encdoer and I noticed no difference other then reduced cpu utilization and ability to do a few things without bogging system down.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Originally posted by: Duvie
Hmmmm.....I thought I have heard that software encoding can suffer the quality of video, but that may have to do with its specific codec and software coding....

Otherwise I had a hardware and a software encdoer and I noticed no difference other then reduced cpu utilization and ability to do a few things without bogging system down.

If you are using a crappy codec then any rendering can degrade image quality. Any of the "major players" (Matrox, Vegas Video, Canopus, Adobe, Apple, etc.,) though will use a quality codec. They days of needing hardware excelleration for real time DV are numbered though (assumig your rig is fast enough).


Lethal