Newbie Capture Card question!
 

Newbie here and had a quick question on the difference between uncompressed capture cards and regular 1394 capture cards? Pros and Cons? Is the quality higher on uncompressed capture cards such as the Kona? I plan on doin some HD editing in the near future (z1u or a hvx200) and wanted to know if i'll be able to get better quality footage with an uncompressed capture card? any advice is appreciated thanks in advanced.

Uncompressed captures are much better quality, but require expensive hardware demands. If you're ultimately going to film or broadcast, having these large files are often important.

If your end product is a NTSC/PAL DVD, then shooting HD with a DVCProHD codec will be more than sufficient, and much cheaper.

Keep in mind, if you're recording to tape, then your footage aleady has compression, so capturing uncompressed is kinda pointless. If you are in a studio environment (like a chromakey set), then you can ingest directly to your computer for a higher quality recording.

so say I was using a z1u and I was recording to a firestore, then the footage would not be compressed? and in order to capture from a card (kona) you would need a seperate vtr? you couldn't use a camcorder as a vtr?

Recording to the firestore will have compressed HDV files. The difference is the footage is stored to a disk, rather than tape, eliminating the 'capture' time for your NLE. You can just copy the footage over to the computer via i-link.

If you're going to use the firestore, a KONA card isn't really part of the capture process at all, it's all through the i-link.

The only way to get uncompressed is go component out of your camera directly to your computer via the Kona card LIVE (or some capable VTR device). Again, you'll need a beefy setup to achieve these captures.

If you press REC on your camera, you've got compression.