I am upgrading to the A1 at the moment, and up until now I have used my reliable old Pinnacle DV500 capture card to grab footage from my SD cameras.

I am guessing that setup won't work with the A1, as the Pinnacle is an SD only setup.

What sort of card should I be getting to capture the HDV footage?

Take a look at Edius NX for HDV, I am very happy with it, CPU dependant so the faster your computer the more layers and effects you can stack on it for realtime performance.

Does the Edius NX work with Vegas?

If you are working native then you do not need a capture card for HDV.
Firewire plug and play.

what are capture cards used for then?

what are capture cards used for then?

My understanding is that they are also used for realtime rendering and encoding. Does anyone have any suggestions for a Mac solution?

Does the Edius NX work with Vegas?

Hi Eric. No, the Edius hardware comes with Edius NLE software. I don't think there is any hardware acceleration solution for Vegas, except for the Magic Bullet plugin which uses the GPU.

Richard