There are so many capture cards out there, but alas, for all I know bout PC hardware, vid capping is my weak spot... I have seen price tags from £30 right up to 5 figure numbers... Please could someone suggest a reasonably priced capture device that would meet my needs as described below. I wanna cap in VirtualDub, using huffyyuv codec, then I wana run it through AVIUtil to turn the segmented files into one, and I wanna put that one file back into VD and run filters to tidy it up and resize capped footage, then compress to divx... What I want is a card that supports S-Video in, Composite in, and left and right audio in. Optional, but preferable is all of these out, but not required. To give you an idea of what price range Im looking at I have considered the Pinnacle Studio Deluxe 8, whats this like? I want some good quality captures. Any help greatly appreciated, thanks in advance...
I bought the Pinnacle MovieStudio USB capture device which comes with Studio 8 editing software for $200. The captures can be done in AVI, MPEG2, and other formats. The quality is great; however, to create a DVD with Studio 8 is long and tedious. Expect a 1-hr video to take 4 hrs to create (not incl. edit time). Most important things to consider before even getting a capture card are the following: hard drive space (20min = 1GB for best quality), USB2 or Firewire input (no USB 1.1 or PCI card crap), CPU Processor & RAM (at least 512MB). Actually, they suggest getting a 2nd hard drive.
Would i high end video card + soundcard suffice? Might be worth considering. I would argue PCI is much more efficient. Whoa... you wanna capture with Huffy and recode to reencode to DivX? Wouldnt it be simpler just to stick to one or the other? Or consider xvid?
I would suggest the canopus advc-100 firewire capture device, it is the only device in it's price range $250usd that will keep audio and video in sinc. I used a graphics board but that did not work good at all and every one I talked to does not like usb devices. Look at "vcdhelp" for reviews on capture devices. With the canopus and ulead dvd movie factory I put movies to dvd flawlessly. It captures as a dv avi file which needs to be converted or directly to dvd format.
I used a asus v8200t2 64 meg geforce. The quality i get with the canopus advc-100 is much better. I capture DV avi's which are very large but are not compressed nearly as much as with the graphics board. The graphics board gave me problems at 640x480 and above, skipped frames and the audio would loose synchro. With the canopus i get NO dropped frames and the audio ALWAYS stays in synch. I read about capture devices on ww_.vcdhelp.com, they have reviews on most capture devices and cards. The canopus was rated the best at the time and I tried it and love it. It is also more versitle I think than most cards as it has svhs in, analog video in, dv in, audio in, svhs out, dv out, audio out, analog out( you do need software like vegas video that supports video out to watch on tv). The file sizes are very large when captured as dv-avi, 12gig per hour but the quality when converted to dvd is awesome(especially when recording from directv). I can only go by what i have tried and read, i am sure that graphics cards have gotten alot better than my asus was but the canopus has worked great from day 1 without messing with compression codecs or driver updates.
