Friends:

I am seeking your recommendations for an analog Video Capture Card with
both video and audio inputs (to maintain sync). It will be used in a 400MHz
Pentium II BX-chipset system with IDE and SCSI hard drives, and a Diamond
Viper V550 AGP video card.

The primary use will be for converting VHS video camera footage to digital.
We will be creating training videos, so we will convert the analog video to
computer files, edit (to remove the superfluous; and add voice-over,
cutaways, graphics and PC screen shots), and render it a MPEG-1 format that
can be stored on a CDR and played on PCs (multimedia) and DVD players (as
VCDs).

Our software is Adobe Premiere (already purchased). Obviously, price/value
is a major purchasing factor.

I am looking for opinions based upon your actual experiences. I have a
fairly good idea of the products out there since I've talked to our A/V
guys (who have much more expensive equipment -- we can borrow cameras but
not the Avid), followed the newsgroups (rec.video.*) and researched the
websites (cf.: http://www.videoguys.com/ |  http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/ |
http://mpegav.com/  |  http://www.helsinki.fi/~jyhokkan/digital.htm  |
http://www.borcellino.com/videocodecs.html).

Thanks, in advance, for your gems of wisdom.

Regards,

John Chin

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