Buz multimedia producer pc

[CoCoNiPs]

Anyone know much about the capture quality of this card
Can you use it with a regular ide hardrive or do you have to use a scsi drive?
I don't know anything about scsi other than I don't want to buy a drive just to use the card

[VisiBill]

The Buz provides a SCSI port on the card. I think IOmega were using it to try and stimulate sales of their Jaz SCSI drive.

However it does work fine with an IDE drive. I get good reults with my 7200 rpm IDE drive, using AVI_IO for capture to ensure the sound stays in sync. Capture at full PAL resolution (720x572 at 25fps) is fine with 1GHz Athlon.

I use my own editor to select the clips I want (see http://www.billh.demon.co.uk ) and then convert to SVCD (or VCD format) using TMPGenc. I get much better results this way than capturing directly to MPEG with my ATI AIW 128 Pro.

The drivers have a reputation for being buggy - make sure you get v1.3 drivers.

[Fusmali]

Please note there are no Windows2000 or XP drivers for the BUZ. There was a project to release Shareware drivers for Win2000 etc, but it was posted last week in a video newsgroup, that the developement time against the interest and profitablity of the shareware price for the drivers would be make it unpracticle, thus no chance of any new drivers or compatiblity with Win2000 or XP.

The 1.3 drivers work very well on capturing when used with either AVI_io or the Morgan Codec but the playback/output can sometimes be problematic especially when using transistions or other items that need re-rendering as the drivers tend to get the interlace order wrong. This produces awful flickering. If the file is captured at, or reduced to 360x240 NTSC or 360x288 PAL the interlace is not required and flicker is gone, but so is the quality. The advantage of the lower resolutions is that the resulting video will appear as if it was filmed on a good quality Video8 film camera.

The BUZ also has an MPEG capture option, at best this can only be described as poor quality and not recommended unless no alternative is available. The best part of the BUZ is the SCSI interface which worked faultlessly from day 1 til I finally removed it from my machine due to upgrading to Win2000.

[Fusmali]

nearly forgot, there are some 3rd party driver patches available that improve the behaviour of the drivers but they still tend to be a problem. There are also still a few web site with advice and tips for the BUZ worth checking them out using Google.

[mickboss]

Capture quality of that card is fabulous but drivers SUCK!!!

If you ALREADY own that card and have stable drivers you have one of the best card around for the price. It has scsi and great performance.

I don´t have that card now but when I had it, with a 700 MHz celeron, I could capture 720x576 25fps in virtualdub with PICVIDEO´s Motion Jpeg codec. You can use Huffyuv codec which is also very good. Image quality and sound are one of the best around!

PS: If you are about to buy that card - DON´T DO IT!!! Iomega stop producing drivers for it in 1998 - No windows 2000/XP support nor new motherboard chipsets! 8)