Firewire vs Realtime Editing Cards
 

Hi guys, I have a regular firewire card and have exported edited footage back to my DV cam but noticed the quality was nowhere near a good as the original footage. I was curious to know if the quality was any better using a real time editing card. I'm using Adobe Premiere 6.0 on a PIII 866 with ATI Radeon card.

Any help would be much appreciated.

I think there's too little information to diagnose your actual problem. Improved transfer fidelity isn't a benefit of real time cards--firewire transfers should be lossless, regardless of hardware.

Likely, there's some bad recompression going on, and you should take a look at the output codec you're using. It would be helpful to post some representative images or full-res video clips to the web for DVInfo.net members to examine--we'd figure out your problem in no time flat for sure!

How are viewing the captured footage and what software are you using? Some "bundled" software uses lower resolutions for editing.

The firewire card should give you exactly the same resolution as any real time card.

Almost all firewire cards use the same chips for firewire capture, whether they are a $30 card, or a $1200 real time card.

FWIW, I use a generic firewire card that cost $25 with perfect results. You are probably looking at a software problem.

ok thanks for the responses guys. The footage seems to be fine now for some reason. But it's good to know that there is no quality difference between a regular card and an RT card.

thanks again.

Old problem, need to keep an eye on the basics. More memory, fast computer, defrag, faster bigger hard drive etc. . . If you can keep your video on a separtate hard drive from your operating system.

Yes there are only few chips that is "firewire" compliant, NEC and TI are the ones that come to mind. But the exception of the real time card is that it has a separate co-processor for crunching the numbers in order to speed up real time editing and rendering, basically when you render using your computer without the aid of a real time card your CPU gets taxed heavily because it is trying to run the other process that it requires to operate, OS, NLE program requirements, etc. as well as the DV capture. But the real time card will take over much of the duties and lessen the load of the CPU, thus giving you the boost in performance. But capturing from DV should not be affected, usually this will bog down if the bus that the firewire card is trying to utilize is busy orf no busses are available, you will get a drop. The best thing to do is while capturing you have nothing else running, just let it capture. I tried capturing, using the net and cleaning up my video drive and the captured data had frame drops and stuff.

While quality is not affected by the hardware in video transfers, the software can have a big difference in quality.

Some software converts the video color space to RGB which subtly degrades the image. It also has to covert it back after the edit.

Some software insists on rendering everything on the timeline. That will degrade the image quality.

Every time you place an effect on a clip, create a transition, or add a title, you degrade the image because it has to be decompressed and recompressed during the process.