fire wire or capture video card?

[bahl]

I have done a few searches and have not found what I'm looking for.

I have an ati rage furry pro and hear it does a good job capturing video.
I also have fire wire. Which hardware is best for capturing video from camcorder? My camcorder is Canon ZR60.

[Richard_G]

As your camcorder is MiniDV it should have Firewire/DV out. Use that rather than analogue capture. Firewire simply copies the digital data from your tape to your hard drive. No problems with dropped frames (unless your pc is very low spec or very sick), audio/video sync, etc. Analogue capture can be hard work, DV transfer just works.

[Prof-x]

DV transfer may be most peoples first choice but it can be very very limiting for people with slower pc's with little space.

If you have a capture card, capturing by S-Video would be fine. It cuts out the massive RAW AVI files that DV capture produces, which then has to be encoded which can takes hours. Capturing by S-Video for me allows me to capture straight into mpeg dvd format with no noticeable quality loss or dropped frames.

Even if theres slight quality loss (not really noticable at average viewing distance) it still out-weights the use of DV simply because DV takes hours and hours of ripping and encoding to get your final result. My capture card has a direct burn facility to DVD which is even better.

[Will Hay]

DV transfer may be most peoples first choice but it can be very very limiting for people with slower pc's with little space.

If you have a capture card, capturing by S-Video would be fine. It cuts out the massive RAW AVI files that DV capture produces, which then has to be encoded which can takes hours. Capturing by S-Video for me allows me to capture straight into mpeg dvd format with no noticeable quality loss or dropped frames.

Even if theres slight quality loss (not really noticable at average viewing distance) it still out-weights the use of DV simply because DV takes hours and hours of ripping and encoding to get your final result. My capture card has a direct burn facility to DVD which is even better.

Firstly, you assume many, many people have a card capable of superb mpeg2 captures.
If you're one of the few (or one of the few who is happy with the result; well done).
I have never heard of a computer which is limited by speed as far as firewire is concerned, and the file sizes produced by DV (circa 13gb an hour) are hardly maximum HDD space nowadays.
For the price of a good meal you can pick up a perfectly good firewire card and have none of the problems associated with anaolgue capture.
Why on earth would you risk capturing DV as anaolgue?
Secondly, I don't know how much ripping you do when transferring DV to your PC but down here on planet earth we don't do any.
It as absoluteley ridiculous to suggest an ATI Rage Fury could match the benefits of a DV camcorder via firewire.
In the context of this thread and the assistance sougt, do you really think you're helping?
I have done extensise testing in a thread I created recently which includes many, many screenshots which shows, hand down, the benefits of this simple method.
Notwishstanding this, I agree people have different targets.
Some don't wish to wait for encoding, some don't care for editing but for simple ease of use, effortless, flawless 'captures' without the worry of 'which compression?', 'which sample freq?', 'which quality setting?', 'why is my audio out of sync?'....
.....there is nothing, nothing like DV via firewire.
Especially for the new user.
Will
Will