Hello Mark,

Monday, June 10, 2002, 3:42:55 AM, you wrote:

MR> I have recently been learning about video editing myself. I'm no expert,
MR> and I am as interested in replies to this thread as you are.

Video editing... Done a little of that, let me share my feelings :-)


To capture videos, you need a quality capture card. Cheap TV cards
will capture analog video for you, but the results are sub-optimal (to
be fair, I use a cheap TV card and am satisfied with the results).

Watch out for the drivers. They are fairly complex, and may not run
well under all OS. For example, my card only captures well under
Windows98 -- 2000 and XP drivers are bad. Pinnacle Studios' DV10, a
professional solution, AFAIK until this day only supports Windows 98.

If your source (VCR/camcorder) is analog, you need an analog input /
TV card. If it is digital and has a Firewire (IEEE-1394) port, then
you need a digital input card which is cheaper. I've heard new ATI
Wonder card has both -- this is one thing I'd love to get my hands on
( http://www.ati.com/products/pc/aiwradeon8500dv/index.html ), of course
the price tag is quite intimidating. (but: TV card $50, reasonable
video card with TV-out $150, DV input card $50 -> $250, not too far
from $300 for the ATI product).

I'm not recommending any particular manufacturer/brand since they change
and I haven't been following the market that closely.


Since I worked with analog video sources only, I will not discuss DV
(digital video) further.

There are three approaches to capturing analog video. First, for
professional capture cards that do hardware processing and turn out a
compressed MJPEG (or other format) stream, there is no need for fast
CPU and hard drive -- reasonably modern PC and an UltraATA-66 drive
shall do. But the professional cards that can do that are expensive.

With a regular TV card, the approach I prefer is to get all data
unchanged to the harddisk and then process. Requires: little CPU
power, but very large (2 Gb per 5 minutes of uncompressed video of
Hi8/TV quality, which has twice the resolution of VHS/Video8) and very
fast hard drive. For example, I use a 30Gb 7200RPM Ultra-ATA 100 drive
for that purpose.


The last approach is to capture and compress on-the-fly, approach that
requires most CPU power but little hard-disk capacity. Example: my
Duron 800 MHz CPU encodes with quality I would consider good for
further editing (3Mbps DivX5 video) at the rate of 12 frames per
second. This means that to encode real-time at this quality with this
codec, I would need at least an 1,6GHz CPU (new Athlons or Pentium-4)
-- which turns out to be around 1.8 GHz with the overhead of capture
process and sound recording.

Of course, DivX5 is a very CPU-intensive coder, and there are codecs
that do lower (but acceptable for regular hard disks) levels of
compression with less CPU use, so the example is somewhat extreme. But
still, IMHO, big and fast hard drives cost less than new and fast
CPUs.


OK, this post is getting too long so if there is interest in the topic
I'll cover editing and output in separate posts. Very interested in
your comments and experiences :)

P.S. Video editing questions pop up regularly on PCBuild. Maybe we
should compile a F.A.Q on the topic?


Yours,

+=-.
| Max Timchenko [MaxVT]
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| Freelance website and graphics designer
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