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Thread ID: 51097	2004-11-11 09:04:00	Video Capture Cards_Opinions please	Stumped Badly (348)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
290645	2004-11-12 00:40:00	Will both of these do the job metla & if so which one is better www.imagingtechnology.co.nz www.imagingtechnology.co.nz thanx	Stumped Badly (348)
290646	2004-11-12 00:41:00	All sounds good to me :) You will find the winfast pvr software a breeze to use.	metla (154)
290647	2004-11-12 00:44:00	> Will both of these do the job metla & if so which one > is better > www.imagingtechnology.co.nz > www.imagingtechnology.co.nz > thanx To be honest i would suggest a google on each item to check for feedback. Overall Pinnacle are considered good with some strage quirks,and Canopus are rated even higher. www.dvdrhelp.com also have a large database of user reviews of nearly every device that has apeared on the market.	metla (154)
290648	2004-11-12 01:17:00	susan, There are some good economic dual cpu boxes coming up now and then, you can put a lot of ram in them they take the leadteck cards and the older agp cards. They can make good economic video editing boxes as the twin cpu eases the system call load issues. you can play to your desire, without effecting your other activities. Most have onboard lan so ICS and a KVM can solve other space problems. D.	drb1 (4492)
290649	2004-11-12 01:34:00	Oh Geez guys, come off it... Who really cares if the RAM is DDR2700 or DDR3200?! It makes piss all difference really! I agree that the WinFast cards are very good. Do a bit of Googl'ing before you actually purchase a card. Especially look for posts that may have come from similar forums to this and read about the thoughts of the exact card you're thinking of purchasing. Some (Like my old USB2.0 MSI Vox) have issues saving to the HDD, whilst will view it fine. Same goes for some PCI cards. Hard drive speeds? Anything should do. Most 5400rpm drives write in excess of 20,000KB/s so dont sweat that... If your video is even half uncompressed then something is grossly wrong. CPU Speed? Realistically you want a good 1.6Ghz upwards. You _could_ go down to about 900Mhz but that's pushing it - You definately couldnt view and save the data at the same time - Itd have to be _just_ saved to the drive. RAM? Any speed will do. RAM Access times are so much quicker than HDD that you could have 66mhz SD-Ram and it'll work. I know because Ive done this on a 1.46Ghz Athlon XP 1700+ with no worries :-) Ideally though, you'll want more than 256MB. 512MB is good, but 768 is overkill most of the time. And dont even get me started on the Firewire VS USB - USB is faster, hands down! USB1.0 = 1,200KB/s USB1.1 = 12,000KB/s USB2.0 = 480,000KB/s Firewire (IEEE1394) = 400,000KB/s (Yes, read it - Its slower than USB2.0) Firewireb (IEEE1394b) = 800,000KB/s (But I'm yet to see a device that uses this) So, judging from what Ive just written - You can safely say that its fine to get a USB2.0 Capture card, as well as an external USB2.0 HDD (Be it 5,400 or 7,200rpm) and you'll be able to use them both off the same USB Hub without a worry. Also: There are programs out there which will allow you to burn directly to DVD. Now, admittedly they compress this with MPEG2 Video compression which is the DVD Standard. DVD at x1 is 1,200KB/s. Just for the sake of arguement, lets say than uncompressed is 4x that size at 4,800KB/s (Which means you'd effectively have to burn at 4x, right!?). This still means that you have more than enough bandwidth to capture, burn, and save to your external USB2.0 HDD, all at the same time....! I burn DVD's in Linux with K3b at 2x and it uses an average of 5% CPU usage. I have a 2.8Ghz Pentium4, so that's roughly 140Mhz in use for burning a DVD at 2x. As for RAM access times - You can use EDO Ram and its still one hell of a lot faster than your HDD. I'd be curious to know why SD133Mhz Ram was mentioned as being "entry-level"? Sure its about the minimum you can get at PC shops now days, but whats wrong with 66mhz SD-Ram?? Is it now the bottleneck? My apologies if this comes off sounding annoyed - Im not, and not intending to offend.... Im simply laying some facts down ;-) Chill.	Chilling_Silence (9)
290650	2004-11-12 01:56:00	hmm . . . . facts . . . The issue with firewire is that most software (infact all i have used) expects it,and if you instead feed it via USB it automaticly resrticts the captured file to a low res and highly compressed format . Due to this the highend dedicated capture boxs are all firewire,and the usb units are lower scale home user orintated . This may be changing or indeed have changed over the last few months due to USB2 but was certainly the case in the past . . . and like i said none of my current hardware or software will capture in a lossless format via USB2 . I would be very interested to know if someone has managed to capture high quality via USB2 . cpu speed? Ram? Harddrive speed? If your going to be doing encoding then it all counts,granted you will get by with a midrange machine with no sweat involved,but if you have the hardware then it will be far quicker,especially when applying filters to an encoding process .	metla (154)
290651	2004-11-12 02:05:00	And the other good thing bout the Leadtek XP deluxe (and most probably the expert), is the program gives u the option to record in various MPEG 1/2 formats, burn straight to VCD/DVD, uncompressed AVI, and SuperVCD. All u have to do is make sure u get the right option for line in before u record, or you'll have no sound!	Spacemannz (808)
290652	2004-11-12 06:39:00	> As for RAM access times - You can use EDO Ram and its > still one hell of a lot faster than your HDD . I'd be > curious to know why SD133Mhz Ram was mentioned as > being "entry-level"? > Sure its about the minimum you can get at PC shops > now days, but whats wrong with 66mhz SD-Ram?? Is it > now the bottleneck? > > Chill . Chill, EDO, SD 66-100-133- RD600-700-800, ddrs each to its own architechture . What you can do with a k6 2T 500 and 750 sd100, I a Nicer/Pleasenter experience with1 . 2 celeron and 1 g sd133 . and agin with a twin 1g 133 p3 with 1g rd800 and scsi drives . and on again to 3g h/t p4s and multi gig ram, or zenon prossesors . Budget is allways a feature, but the quicker the gear, with out spending a fortune, the more enjoyable the experience, no? D .	drb1 (4492)
290653	2004-11-12 07:41:00	Hi Stumped Badly, I have a Pinnacle capture card similar to this (www.imagingtechnology.co.nz) although mine came with a breakout box. I don't do any of the professional stuff and have only used it for capturing VHS tape and digital camera images, but have found it to be very good for this. The included software has let me create some pretty awful examples of editing which is purely due to my abilities and not the fault of the software ;) I used to use a Athlon XP 2200 with a gig of RAM but dropped this down to a 1300 Duron with no decrease in editing/converting time. It would appear that this particular card does quite a bit of the processing rather than pushing it on to the CPU. HTH :)	Gorela (901)
290654	2004-11-12 10:07:00	Thanks Gorela I was looking at that one & have emailed them regards differences between that model & the next one up. What is a breakout box & what does it do? Cheers	Stumped Badly (348)
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