How involved is a video card in capturing?

[sirmarlo]

I'm building a new system soon and am wondering how involved a video card is when it comes to video capturing from a miniDV camcorder and editing this video. I'm looking to get right now a matrox g550 which has 32mb of onboard memory simply because it supports dual monitors. Should I opt for a better video card if it will help my editing performance?

[lordsmurf]

A computer graphics card ("video" card should be used for describing video, not computer graphics output) is not very important, not these days. I don't think I've seen a card in recent years that couldn't support video. Your only exceptions are some specialty video cards from Matrox and Canopus, ones that insist on mating with certain kinds of graphics cards. Most of your 32MB and higher cards made in the past couple of years (say 2001-2002 and more recent), should be fine. Especially AGP ones. Your integrated video cards (part of motherboard) are really the only ones to give you a headache.

Assuming there are not hardware/driver conflicts, anything you get from Matrox should be top notch.

Video is more CPU intensive, though don't skimp on the RAM either (512 or more is suggested, maybe 256 minimum). Same for hard drives, 7200rpm with a good 8MB buffer, not the slow stuff.

[offline]

Lordsmurf is correct. However some video cards are claimed
to enhance or help speed up the process by directing some
of the cpu intensive graphic tasks to the GPU (Graphic Processor
on the video card).

On the whole, however, if your system specs are good enough
you can capture with a sub $50 card just as well. Canopus and
their ilk offer hassle less encoding and can prevent problems
such as audio out of sync issues and it does not matter what
video card you have. If you are into DV, Canopus is worth a
look. If you are into analog, then a cheap bt8xx card should
be fine along with any decent video card.

Your matrox g550 should be fine. On older cards, memory is
not that much of an issue. I've captured with a 4 meg
Tseng labs et4000.

Read, research and most important, test yourself. If there was
a "best" solution we all would be using it

[syeager]

I agree, except for special cases. I have an ATI 9500 Pro with 128MB. I have used both a Compro VideoMate Gold + and an ATI TV Wonder Pro. The Compro used a great deal more CPU utilization than the ATI even though both are software based. The Compro was at 50% for 1/2 D1 and 100% at full D1 resolution. The ATI was only 40% for 1/2 D1 and 70% at full D1. As I understand, the ATI utilizes the pixel shaders on the ATI Radeon processor to aid in mpeg encoding.

Just my 2 cents.