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Looking for a hardware video encoder/video capture card for up to $150

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Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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April 13, 2008 11:12:33 PM

Hello all,

Just as the thread title states, I'm looking for a hardware video encoder/video capture card (I'm not entirely sure what to call it anymore!) for up to $150. Truthfully, my budget is closer to $100, but I can stretch it to $150.

I use Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 to edit my videos (although I really prefer to call them "short films") and I export them to .flv files. As of now, I have no separate video capture/encoder card, so it's all CPU rendering, which is slow as hell.

I've done a little research and from what I can tell, one can get either a USB or PCI/PCIe x1 card. I'd prefer to have a PCI card, but I can make do with a USB card. 1 or more FireWire inputs would be nice, even though I have a FireWire input on my motherboard; composite and S-video, along with some audio inputs would be nice, too.

I'm running XP Pro SP2, and the card needs to be compatible with Premiere Pro CS3. Does such thing as a .FLV encoder card even exist? Because it takes my computer ~45 mins to encode a 3:30 minute film to .FLV, and it's simply too long.

Thanks in advance!

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April 14, 2008 1:09:34 PM

Heres a list of the top capture cards.....

http://www.videohelp.com/capturecards

ps: which software do you use to encode to flv? also, what is the original file type of your vid before you convert it to flv? 45 mins is an awful lot of time to encode a 3 and a half min vid... a faster CPU and RAM would definitely help.
April 14, 2008 7:22:19 PM

The raw footage is .AVI format, and I use the Adobe Media Encoder (built into Premiere) to encode to .FLV.

However, when it's encoding the video to .mpeg or .mpeg2 format, it's significantly faster; almost real-time speed.

My CPU is an Athlon 64 3700+ overclocked to 2.54 GHz. I haven't been able to get higher than 2.54 stable. I'd love to get a CPU upgrade, but socket 939 dual-cores are very rare nowadays, and I don't want to keep putting money into an obsolete platform.

Right now I have 1GB of DDR400; I'd like to get another 2 x 512MB sticks.

I like encoding directly to .FLV because it (seemingly) speeds up the upload to YouTube. Even if there's no card with .FLV hardware encoding, I'll be happy to get something to speed up. mpeg encoding and just processing video effects.
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April 14, 2008 7:57:31 PM

As far as I know, there are no consumer cards that will accelerate video encoding. All that work is done on the CPU.

Unless you go for something like a matrox RT.X2... but those are more in the thousands of dollars range the last time I checked.
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