DV Raptor vs. ADS PYRO ProDV

[Guest]

After considering the advice on this board I have decided to go with a stand alone capture card. I want to use the card to capture home movies from my Sony DV Camcorder and burn them to CD/DVD. I want something that will allow me to use MPEG2 and hopefully MPEG4. Of course I want great quality and stability, but I can't afford to spend a great deal. Two cards that have been recommended are the Canopus DV Raptor and the ADS PYRO ProDV. Can anyone compare and contrast these in term of performance and features? The Pinnacle DV200 has also been suggested, but given the articles on THG about other Pinnacle board's stability and ease of use, it seems this would be too difficult for a newbie. Also, are there any other cards you might suggest in this pricerange? I plan on using this with a VIA 266a MB and RAID array. Thanks.

 

[Guest]

Call it a personal fealing but I'd go with the Canopus.
BTW, where was that THG article you are reffering to ?
I work with several Pinnacle products on various price ranges and from several generations (DC30 to T3K) and I hardly see problems.
In any case I will not select the DV200/300 as I don't think of this two cards very much.

If all you want is DV then you can do with a standard Fire Wire card and cable to the camera without a big problem. (25$). Also make sure to look at the programs that you get with the card. In several cases the programs are the real addon and features.

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[Guest]

Scuba,
Thanks for your reply. The article that reports difficulty installing the Pinnacle DV500 Plus was Part II of "Building a DV Capture System" at http://www4.tomshardware.com/video/01q3/010801/index.html .

If you can do this with only buying a firewire card, why would you buy a more expensive card? What features would these cards offer over a simple firewire setup? It seems that these cards might be worth purchasing just for the bundled software (Adobe Premiere, Ulead, etc). Your thoughts are appreciated.

 

[Guest]

Depend on the card but,
Several cards have Analog inputs and outputs together with the DV ones. This enalble you to capture from more sources and output directly to VHS.
One more thing that is probably the most important it give you a option to monitor your work on a normal TV during all stages for work.

Second thing is real time options.
Let's say that you have two video clips on the time line and you want to put a transition betwin them.
Normaly you set the transition and then need to render the video in order to see the resoult. If it's not good you make changes, render, chenges , render untill you get it correct. With a Real time system you can just put the tansition/Filter/Color effect and play out. This save time as well as drive space.

Some cards offer excelerated export to various file formats. for example you can get a card that do some of the final DV to Mpg2 encoding using hardware and this make exporting to DVD or VCD much faster.

Depend on the card, and as the card is more expencive it will offer more features in real time or excelerated features.

Install of the card is very much depend on your hardware with emphasis on main board. Some capture/Edit cards just don't like some chipsets or configurations.
Normaly you can make it work very nice with little tweeking if any. My Pinnacle DC2000 was working perfect from start on my A7V.

Intel / AMD - <A HREF="http://www.llnl.gov/asci/news/white_news.html" target="_new">IBM are still the best</A>