Graphic (AGP) card and Capturing

[Video-Pal]

Hi Guys

I need some advise on capture and graphic card related issues

1. What role do, if any, the quality of graphic card play in video capture and susequent editing authoring etc. At present i am using the integrated graphics on an intel 845GBV mother board and my AGP slot is empty. I have been mainly using my computer to capture DV movies from my mini DV camcorder through a simple OHCI compliant firewire port with no problems.
I wish now to capure analogue VHS tapes with the ultimate aim to put them on VCD, DVD etc. Will i face a problem with integrated graphics?

2. My DV camera JVC GR-DVP3 does not allow me to use it as a by pass for analogue to DV conversion so i need a capture card. But at the same time i dont think i would have much use for a Analogue capture card since there are very few VHS home video and some old TV serials that i want to put on VCD etc so i dont want to spend too much money on it. On the other hand i dont mind getting a simple TV tuner card like Pinnacle PCTV - i do understand from various forums - that TV tuner cards are not great capture devices but for me even an "OK" job would do so what do u say should i go for a TV tuner card instead of a pure capture card?

3. I have a pentium 4, 2.4 GHZ, 256 (PC 2100) RAM - do i need to increase it? Does analogue capture require more memory than DV capture?

4. Does it make more sense to capture VHS as uncompressed AVI and then convert it to MPEG format?

Thanks in Advance!

[LongAshes]

I purchased a used ATI 64 mb DDR Vivo card for my analog capturing. Card didn't cost much and the capturing worked great. Once completed, I took the card out and replaced it my original.

I researched a lot of cards and found that cheaper solutions provided tons of problems. i.e. Audio & Video synch problems, etc. Quality issues, etc. ATI's software compatibility worked fine. Keep in mind with analog that most capture cards only handle video, you still have to run the audio through your sound card. Because of 2 separate devices, performance is an issue. Make sure your hdd is not fragmented, nothing else is running, etc.

Since memory is so cheap, I'd upgrade your Ram anyway. I had 512 mb at the time and had audio/video synch problems until I cleaned up my hdd and background programs.

I captured in MPG2 with no problems. Not sure if that was the "best" way but it suited my purposes fine. I burned the videos to DVD and archived the tapes.

Hope it helps.

Rich

[Video-Pal]

Thanks for one suggestion I got, but it seems in the multiple questions i asked the basic issue got drowned can someone please explain to me what exactly is the role of graphic cards in video capture and subsequent editing/authoring etc. In other words does a superior graphic card improve any of these activities and in what way?

[D_Knife]

short answer - no
long-ish answer - maybe
If your video card has enough onboard RAM to hold a complete copy of the frame in memory then that's about all it will do - any card with more than 8Mb of RAM will do this. You don't get any performance increases with a faster video card
Video encoding will not use any of your video cards 3D features to accelerate operations - except if your using something like 3D effects or transitions and in some cases not even then.

See previous poster for questions 2,3

Question 4

Does it make more sense to capture VHS as uncompressed AVI and then convert it to MPEG format?

Does it make more sense than what???

Generally speaking uncompressed AVI is next to useless - it's so large and unwieldy that you need masses of diskspace . Go with HuffyUV - very nearly the same quality as uncompressed except it's about 30-40% of the size.

[txpharoah]

There is a direct correlation, though it would take at least a page to describe it in detail...

Simply stated, a bad graphics card will reduce the quality and performance of the video capture card. The video card integrated into a motherboard always sucks, so buy a real card, even if it is just some $50 budget card.

Otherwise, you can only look forward to a long, painful capture card experience. Especially if BOTH the video card and capture card are cheapo hardware.

If you have the money, grab an ATI All In Wonder card (preferably a RADEON AIW card). The AGP AIW Radeon 7500 cards are about $125 these days, and the older 7200 PCI and AGP AIW Radeon cards go for as little as $60 on eBay.