Capture Card vs. Firewire

[carpedick]

What's the general preference? I was looking into a Pro-ONE capture card and picking up a new vcr and a new hard drive, when a friend told me that it'd be easier to pick up a dv deck and a firewire card. The deck would allow me to dub analog to dv and then bring it onto the computer via firewire. My understanding is that this would result in less dropped frames and overall better quality. Is this the case?

[ktnwin]

Absolutely right. A better way is to get a Sony Digital 8 camcorder (about 500$ now) instead of the DV deck.
The Dig8 camcorder serves as the DV deck as well as a video camcorder with excellent quality.
Capture thru Firewire results in no frame lost (I lied here, my capture software always lose 1 frame at the start of capture) even on a slow PC (266Mhz).

[Allan55]

Hi,

(copied from a previous post)

My major decision points for the external Hollywood DV Bridge are:

High quality capture (including audio in one device... no sync problems). This is beyond what I need now but maybe I won't have to upgrade so soon.

The Bridge is a completely external device; therefore no motherboard compatibility issues which seem to exist for the 'Digital Video Creator II' and maybe others (this appears to be true; it's been plugged-into 2 different VIA chipset MBs (KT133A and KT266A and works fine). Both MBs use no-name firewire cards with Texas Instruments chips. My friend's is also plugged-into VIA boards.

Longer life (no special drivers) because it "looks like" a digital camera on a firewire port (I hope).

This wasn't a decision point when I bought the DV Bridge but... I've put another firewire card in a second computer and I can capture and process on two boxes with one (expensive) capture device.

To my mind, external is the only way to go.

Allan