Capture Cards?
 

Hi, I have been using ulead videostudio 5.0 capture card for a few years to capture still frames from my mini dv video. From what I understood there is no difference in the picture quality. as long as it has a deinterlace option on it. All the cards I checked capture at the standard 720x480. Is there some cards that will give a clearer capture than others?

I know it's hard to get a crisp capture if the lighting is not good or if the camcorder was shaking too much but several people have told me I should be getting better captures from a gl-1.

thanks,
Tony

It's really up to the cameras resolution, that will make a difference, but you also have some codecs that are good or not so good, but that is very hard to see unless you project it on a big screen.

There is a huge difference in quality inbetween these cards. It
is all in:

1. component quality

2. driver quality

3. supported codecs + bitrate.

Most capture cards support the MJPEG (Motion JPEG) standard
around 5-6 MB/s. Some of the better cards support 10 or 15
MB/s which gets you a lot nicer quality.

But, if I was you I would just grab the digital DV stream and
extract frames from there. If you want high quality pictures
you are better off with a seperate (digital) photo camera.

Thank you for the replies. I'm not well educated on what a codec is, what the component quality is or the driver quality. I captured all my pics from a $100 capture card made by ads technology and ulead videostudio software. I used firewire. I did notice the difference in the quality of the pics from a one chip camcorder and three chip but I thought the three chip should be clearer. Now I have a Sony Vaio with a built in capture card and will use adobe premier to capture the stills from the video when I learn how to use it. Should it capture clearer now?

Thank you,
Tony

Tony, it's not up to the NLE system as long as it is firewire, you have to have camera that can handle higher resolutions, progressive scan etc.

Tony, it should be clearer indeed.

Is anything wrong with using an Audigy card as a capture card beings it has IEEE port built in?

Should work just fine Glen