Capturing using s-vid or firewire?

[ScottyDISU]

Ok, I've got an ATI TV Tuner/Capture card, and I just got a sony Digital Camcorder. When I try to transfer the movies from the camera to the computer using S-video, the quality gets really horrible no matter what codec I use. I've tried multiple codecs and resolutions. My question is if I dish out the money to buy a firewire card will this fix my quality and dropped frame rate problems? Thanks.

[holistic]

Scotty

Spend the $40--$70 and get an ieee1394 (firewire card)

Connect the camera to the firewire and 'transfer' away.

There will be no quality loss because you are just transferring the zero/ones of a digital format as opposed to 'capturing' an analog signal which is a milivoltage electrical signal being converted to digital in your ATI capture card.

Dropped frames will not be an issue because the DV codec is ~3.7 Mb/sec.
If your harddrive cannot sustain that take it back. Todays modern drives should be able to do sustained writes of 20 Mb/sec or better.

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