Video Editing Hardware Advice

[gruvey]

Hi all, I'm interested in building an editing rig to edit small films. I'm not sure if they will be shot on DV or analog or both.
I've been out of video editing for about 5 years, and I'm seeing a lot has changed. My biggest question is what hardware is necessary to do sort of Prosumer level stuff.
When I was doing it, because processors and hard drives were not all that fast, you needed a video capture/accelerator card to offload the burden from the cpu. These days cpu's are much faster, and I'm seeing a lot of "video capture" cards that are just firewire ports. Is that all you really need? I'll sport out the cash for a decent capture card if they serve any purpose, otherwise, I guess if the CPU's doing all the processing, ill put it into the processor or an extra gig of ram or something.
I would much appreciate some advice and maybe a basic explanation of how things are done these days. Thanks alot!

 

[Crashman]

I noticed that a couple years ago, it's nothing more than false advertizing to call a Firewire card a video-capture card, because it CANNOT capture video. All it can do is transfer a data stream from a digital camera to your PC. For video (ie, analog video) you still need a video input.

I just got an ATI TV-Wonder Elite, it captures video nicely and has full-hardware compression. You can read the review at Sysopt.

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[gruvey]

When you say full hardware compression, do you mean it uses that card to compress the video to MPEG2? Is that what's being used these days?
My thinking was, I'm going to build a nice rig with good specs, but on top of the processor, and sticks of ram, I wanted something that would really take the task of compression etc. This way I know I'd have a beefy enough system for just about any project, and at least a few years ago, if you took on too much at one time, the computer would usually crash or freeze.
It seems like the only cards out today are for PVR/DVR abilities for creating a home TiVo. I'm wondering if these sames cards are the best bet for editing purposes. I'm not sure if they even have firewire ports however.
As far as the Wonder cards go, I don't intend to use the capture card for games or anything and in fact plan to get a graphics card specifically for that (why build a beefy system and not put a card for gaming right?). So I'm really just looking for the extra processing and input capability. I might even use the gaming graphics card as the video out if I have to since they all come with that these days.
My system specs that im looking at are:
AMD 64 3200-3500
Mobo W/ Sata2 RAID,
1 gig corsair low latency 2-2-2-5 PC3200 DDR
2 74gig 10K RPM WD Raptor SATA HD
Audigy 2 Sound
Decent Graphics Maybe NV 6600GT
NEC Dual Layer 16X DVD/RW

Anyway appreciate the advise and responses, keep em coming. I'd like to figure this one out before I get the rig so I don't paint myself in a corner by getting the wrong stuff.
Thanks

 

[Crashman]

Yes, when I say "full hardware compression" I mean a card that compresses video to MPEG2 using it's own processor. That, as opposed to hardware-assisted compression or software-compression.

Firewire is a data port. Most decent motherboards offer Firewire on the motherboard. The Firewire cards sold as "video capture" cards are nothing special, just standard firewire cards, sometimes with processing software.

You can input your digital Firewire connection to any IEE1394 Firewire port. I'm not certain what you do with your video from there, but it's stored on the camera in digital format, you may have to convert. That's a CPU task done in software.

The TV-Wonder Elite isn't a gaming card. It has no video output, it's not a graphics card. It's a TV-Tuner card that also has S-Video and Composite input, like most other tuner cards. Previous video input cards were the same thing as tuner cards, but with the tuner removed and the composite/s-video remaining.

So I'm recommending you use a Hardware MPEG2 Compression card such as the Hauppauge WinPVR series or the ATI TV-Wonder <b>ELITE</b>. The Elite is the only hardware compression card from ATI.

I'm not really too concerned with your choices for outputting video, because modern graphics cards do that OK, and because I suspect that much of your video will be encoded to DVD or VCD format anyway.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
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