Video capture cards

[rogwar]

Would like to copy a few things from a camcorder video at times like my daughter playing piano. Been looking online a little with mixed reviews. Any recommendations on a card?

Think I would prefer a card to one of the USB versions....or not?

Thanks for any help!

Sheldon

[Fulmar]

Firewire is faster than USB 2.0.  What kind of camcorder do you have?  A lot of them have Firewire/USB connections on them that you can plug straight into your computer.  No need to buy a capture card.

[rogwar]

It's an older Hi8 with just RCA jacks output for video and audio.

[LLogann]

How much you looking to spend?  Canopus is probably overkill for you but.......
http://desktop.thomsongrassvalley.com/products/ADVC55/index.php
That's the cheap version   RCA to Firewire.

It's an older Hi8 with just RCA jacks output for video and audio.

Another, cheaper, company is ADS.......  www.adstech.com
This model:
ADS USBAV-192-EF, retails for less then 50 bucks.

[Rich46yo]

If you go the Canopus route what that gives you is a faster way to edit. Or let me put it this way, you can capture your video using the Canopus codec and can edit more layers faster in realtime. One thing it wont do is allow you to capture video any faster then a regular firewire card will.

Firewire or USB-2 they capture at the same data rates, even tho firewire was created specifically for DV and moves DV more efficiently. There is also the 1394b route, or firewire-8, that can sustain data rates of twice that of regular 1394a firewire, or USB-2. The coming USB-3 is going to have a totally obscene data rate of around 3 gigs a second.

Sound confusing? If you have a fairly new computer and dont want to edit a lot then get a cheap firewire card. Most new computers have them built into the motherboard. The Canopus route is a great way to go if you want to start editing. I use Canopus products and being able to edit in so much real time is a big help for the long form videos I do. Canopus is also known for their excellent drivers and customer service. However I dont know what the scene is with Vista and Canopus.

[eagl]

If all you want to do is simple camcorder tape transfer, pretty much any USB device ought to work.  There are cheap ones that do very little processing and cost about $30, but if you want any hardware processing done by the device then you jump pretty quickly to about $100.  The good thing about the more expensive ones is that they quite often come with better software so you might not need to buy a separate video editing package which would boost the total cost of the cheapo ones right up to where the better ones are.

The only thing against the USB ones is if you're going to use a laptop or an older computer (more than 4 years I'd estimate) then the USB transfer rate might suffer and using USB for video capture might peg your cpu at 100% so you can't do any on the fly encoding.  That means the capture will take longer since it won't be compressed, it'll take a lot of HD space until you compress it, and you'll have to re-encode it all over again to get reasonable compression so you can edit the video without it crushing your computer's resources.

In-computer capture cards are nice I guess, but then you can't easily use it with another computer (taking it with you while visiting family for example).

[indy007]

Go to Best Buy, get a Pinnacle USB input device. Works like a champ. I've used it for getting MiniDV to PC on all my youtube videos. The only catch is that last I looked, they don't have 64bit Vista drivers available yet. If you're running anything but 64bit Vista, it's fine.