video card recomendation - why do i need a capture card?
 

guys i'm building an AMD 64 x2-4200+ system all the stuff are top notch.
the guy that is building it for me recomends nvidia 6600 with 128mb memory.
is this card good enough or would recomnd other ones or upgrades?



i always bring my stuff in through fire wire. why do i need to spend money on capture arads? what are the advangtages?

There are no advantages to having a capture card, unless you plan on capturing analog stuff. Many MiniDV cameras do that conversion these days anyway.

A top notch graphics card (not capture card) will be able to play back more complex sequences from your NLE in real time with no frame dropping. The more your graphics card can handle, the less your CPU has to. Some cards that are graphics/capture cards will also have built in hardware routines for performing 3D transistions which again, goes towards better performance of your editing suite.

One of the most graphics intensive applications is flight simulation. Those folks are always looking for the creme de la creme of graphics cards.


regards,

-gb-

so what model of graphics card would you recommend?

I could be wrong here, but unless you are buying a card specifically designed to work with your NLE (for real-time preview if that's an issue) spending more than $50 is pointless. Keep in mind that most NLE's are not previewing in full res anyway.

Ideally you'd have a dual head card bundled with your NLE, with TV out for an external monitor...but they are quite expensive. For regular old DV, any decent graphics card will do just fine. If you plan to use two monitors, just adding a second graphics card will allow two monitor use.

On newegg.com, you can get a dual monitor video card (VGA + VGA, or DVI/VGA + VGA, or DVI-I/DVI only + VGA) for about $50. The best card would probably be one with DVI + VGA and there's a DVI-VGA adapter in the box (which implies the card can do 2XVGA).

If you want a dual DVI card, look at something like a geforce 6600 with dual DVI output (it may be that not all 6600s have dual DVI).

Apparently it's a hassle to do this? If your motherboard is AGP, the second graphics card needs to be PCI. And performance may be a little lower. And then you gotta make sure the combination works.


External monitoring should be done via your firewire device, hooked up to a broadcast monitor or TV.

What editor? Some editors do care about the graphics card as do some of the newer add-ins such as After Effects 6.5 (DirectX 9 support).