Hi,
I sure am glad that there is a newbie section because the more I have read over the past three weeks the more I have gotten confused about where to even begin. My goal is to put svhs, vhs, hi8, and later, dv onto DVDs via my DVD D105 burner. I am building a new WinXP system from scratch and truly want to avoid any compatibility issues from the very onset.

Before I began reading too much this was my planned design: AMD Athlon XP 2100 processor on the ASUS A7N8X Nvidia Deluxe (ATA133 ready) with Realtek onboard audio. The video card an ASUS Geforce ti4200 64M. . The hard drive(s) I have already. My dedicated data drive is a Maxtor 200G IDE ATA133 8Mcache and will be formatted NTFS. My system drive is a WD 20G ATA100. Adobe Premiere 6.5 is enroute to me.

Here are the questions that I have been unable to resolve no matter how hard I have tried to understand all the information available here at vcdhelp.com. I won’t apologize for being a newbie, but I will apologize for being a really dumb one folks.

1. I am looking hard at the Datavideo DAC-100 as my video interface. If I go with this firewire product is motherboard, video card and sound card compatibility even an issue at all? If so, are there any technologically current, and working options out there now that are not on the “unfriendly” list of chipsets that can take advantage of onboard firewire and ATA133?

2. I know that I am going to want to be able to edit my raw input at times. To me that means joining clips, removing bad frames, voice overs, transitions etc. If I should transfer data by firewire as dv, just what 3 letter file extension will I wind up with when that transfer is downloaded and on my hard drive? Will it be test1.avi or test1.mpg, or what?

3. Is whatever file.xxx dv turns out to be known as every bit as editable as is as would be say an avi or mpg file from a capture card?

4. If I can use a box to convert my analog to dv and transfer to the puter as dv, why on earth would I even want a capture card of any kind? (unless perhaps to encode on the fly which I see so far as being far too problematic and expensive for me right now)

5. Is there ever a case in video and audio processing where the mb onboard audio can be used successfully in lieu of an independent sound card?

6. This last one is almost too dumb to ask, but why not go all the way now that I have proven to the world how ignorant I am in these things. If I were to use either the Canopus or Datavideo 100 box, do I even run an audio cable to my sound card or is the audio part of the firewire stream?

If anyone out there in vcdhelp land can give me layman term answers I will be a friend forever. These questions have stymied me for weeks. Not only do I feel pretty stupid right now, but I also feel too scared to order my computer components until I have a better understanding of what and where compatibility issues would arise that I can totally avoid on my very first configuration. Thanks people. Thanks for recognizing newbees as video experts as yet without the hands on experience.

Richard