hello people, would appreciate any advice on how best to capture betacam footage without losing quality, i'm using a pc with premiere pro, nvidia fx5500 graphics card and wondered if its worth going for the higher-end capture cards. cheers...j

I use a Canopus ADVC500. It has component video and XLR inputs and outputs. It sends those analog signals right into your computer through firewire....Other than an IEEE1394 card, you don't need any other sort of capture device.

Thats true, but would you not still be capturing a DV (compressed) AVI file?

If it was me and you are looking at higher quality than DV25 then I would invest in something like a Matrox AXIO system (http://www.matrox.com/video/home.cfm), or Black Magic card (http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/). Then you can get uncompressed/ higher quality compressed recordings.

You have to buy Matrox AXIO as a system so can be pretty expensive. Black Magic you can buy card only and supports PC, however make sure that your PC meets the recommended system specs.

Hope this helps,

We've been succesfully using Multibridge Pro to import uncompressed from betacam sp. But you don't have to go as high, decklink sp would be enough for your purposes, I think.