Hi all,
a friend of mine has a whole series of videos that he wants to turn into digital so that he can edit them and write out DVD's and VCD's. His geforce2 card has analog input but when he captures he drops a hell of a lot of frames (From 10 to 50% depending on resolution). He has though about getting an analog to digital bridge so he can capture through standard firewire and then we thought that maybe getting an actual capture cards might be better cause he could then use it for editing, real time effects etc. He only has one IDE drive (No raid controller) and was told that the RT2500 would need to have a 3drive raid system setup before it could capture analog.

Can anyone provide us with some advice as to what would be the best path to take to get analog into a digital format......on the cheap. The bridge costs about NZ$1000 (~US$500) and I have heard of editing cards about the same price but just need a bit of help deciding which way to go. Especially if he will need to get a raid setup also.

Cheers
Aaron

The Canopus ADVC-100 is a great analog/digital converter for about $250 US street price. Go to http://www.justedit.com/ppm_advc100.htm for more info.

I highly doubt you would need a RAID set, especially a 3 drives
set (suggestion raid 5, which would be off almost no speed
increase at all). Make sure your harddisk can at least sustain
10 mb/s and that it is defragmented. Preferably put video on
a different partition or seperate drive if possible (from your OS).

This is if you want to capture to either DV or MJPEG. If you want
to do uncompressed you need at least 40 - 50 mb/s, which would
require a striped IDE or SCSI raid set. Promise and adaptec
make some nice IDE raid cards for not too much money. But then
again you might also buy promise's normal IDE ATA 133 card
with a fast UDMA 4, 5 or 6 harddisk to get that speed easily.
(probably not 50 mb/s... I meant 10 - 30 mb /s)

It all depends on how fast your (current) harddisk is.

When I was waiting until I could afford an XL1, I was using a Sony Handicam to shoot short films on and I used the Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge to convert my footage to DV for editing. It worked out really well for me and was only about $250.oo USD.

BTW, if you get this, it's still a really good I dea to take the advice Rob left above.

-Shawn

Hollywood DV-Bridge info:
http://www.dazzle.com/products/hw_bridge.html