So, what's the best firewire capture card on the market right now?

3 replies [Last post]
January 16, 2002 - 18:03
chog
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Joined: May 21 1999

I wanna go out and get the best firewire capture card I can afford (not bothered about software really, as I've already got some which should do the trick), but I've been out of the arena so long I'm way out of touch with what's going on at the moment.

My primary considerations are:


  • The capture quality must be as good as possible

  • The card must be able to rencode the video back to the camera through the firewire

  • For preference I'd like a card which will also control my deck through the firewire cable (I'll be using my Sony TRV-900 camcorder)

  • I'd like the fastest capture/render possible (in my day that was all down to how fast the co-dec on the hardware could go, but with the improvements in the speed of HDDs, RAM and the Bus speed of machines, I'd imagine that these days, speed is more to do with what your computer can handle)
    [/list]

    • The kit I'm using is:

    Self-built PC, with Abit KT7 (non RAID) motherboard; ATA100 HDDs (Two - one for the system, aps and most file storage, the other is a Seagate I think and will be the one I intend to use for Video storage); 128MB PC100 RAM at the moment (but planning to upgrade since prices are so good at the moment) and I'm using a Sony TRV-900 camcorder.

    So, what's my best bet right now? Looking forward to any and all comments.

    Thanks

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    January 17, 2002 - 01:15
    #1
    Gavin Gration
    Offline
    Joined: Jul 29 1999

    How much do you want to spend ?

    How fast is your Athlon ?

    BTW Ram prices are on the up again.

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    January 17, 2002 - 11:38
    #2
    chog
    Offline
    Joined: May 21 1999

    If I can keep it under £100 I'd like to, but am willing to save up for the best consumer kit on the market.

    Athalon's a 700 if I remember correctly.

    Thanx for the tip about the RAM, I'll order some today!

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    January 17, 2002 - 14:55
    #3
    RichardJ
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    Joined: May 7 1999

    Using DV over Firewire, the card hardly comes into the equation as far as quality or performance is concerned. That's because using Firewire you're really just copying data to and from a digital peripheral (the camcorder), no encoding or decoding is done.

    Firewire cards are just ports like USB. Pluging in your camcorder is like plugging in a scanner. The scanner determines quality, not the USB port!

    There's also no hardware codec, it's all in software (one reason why DV generally needs a higher spec CPU than analogue with a dedicated card). Some cards (e.g. Canopus Raptor) provide their own codec, but edit software that uses standard OHCI Firewire ports generally relies on the Microsoft codec built into Windows.

    If you go up market for a real-time card then the picture changes a bit, because these cards can do realtime merging of streams etc. so have hardware codecs. But they're well above your £100 budget!

    There's a good choice of low-cost OHCI Firewire cards around, the issue is not quality, but if there are any interface compatiblity issues with your camcorder. Some people have found a few combinations that don't work, although they should all work if they conform to OHCI. Sony's seem to do best on compatibility though.

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    Home of the MediaStudio Pro 6 Tutorial, and free 6.5 Supplement

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