Cards and Bridge difference

[fiddler2068]

hi all,

been reading like crazy. started out all i wanted to do was make some backups of my dvd's. don't want to really lend them to friends. had some cd's that look like a herd of cats used it for a scratching post.

anyway, capture cards are for direct conversion to mpeg from analog video. the dv-bridge is for analog to dv then you can encode it to whatever you want but the capture quality is of highest possible quality depending on what you started with.

I still puzzled about a few things. do the capture cards allow you to do encoding in real time? ie. sony digicam into firewire to dv. you can then import that file into a application and convert in real time to mpeg?

i think i got the video editing and authoring figured out. which is the better authoring software for making menus and chapters and stuff?

thanks

fiddler

[dood]

Unless you get a HARDWARE MPEG2 ENCODER like the Dazzle2, ADS Instant DVD, WinTV PVR, or some more expensive high-end devices, you will have to use SOFTWARE to convert to MPEG2. MPEG2 must be your final format for use on SVCD/DVD. Software encoding can take a long time (4:1 up to 10+:1 ratio).

On the other hand, DV and AVI are easier to edit.

I personally use two methods: (1) Analog-to-DV (using a Sony DA2 box...similar to the Hollywood DV Bridge but better) for "projects" where I need to do significant editing. (2) Hardware MPEG2 captures (using the ADS Instant DVD) for most "archival" stuff where I can pretty much use a straight capture with little editing.

Many people use inexpensive "TV" cards to capture raw AVI files, but the captured files are too LARGE to fool with in my experience.

Dood