Video Capture Card Resolution

Some months ago I was considering purchasing a Canopus DV Storm with Premier for about $1200. Recently a system crashed and I replaced it temporarily with an HP Pavillion 541C, 512 RAM, (I think an Athalon chip 1.6-1.8 range), and an 80 Gig drive. Off the shelf, the system was about $1100. I got it home and saw the 1394 port on it and thought, what the heck, I'll try capturing some of my PD150 footage that I've never been able to edit. It captured the first 10 minutes of video without any frame loss, and


My question: do all 1394 ports capture the full amount of video information on a DV CAM tape? My capture settings indicate "full DV quality" at 480 x 720. Would a Canopus capture more of the DV CAM information than whatever it is that's capturing this video on the HP?

[Rob Lohman]

yes... all 1394 ports (these actually have nothing to do with the
matter, they are simply a transport bus) will capture at full
resolution (720x480 for NTSC and 720x576 for PAL). With DV you
will ALWAYS get the maximal resolution and information from your
camera. Why? Because it is simply (more or less) a copy
operation. The camera sends the DV packets directly from the
encoding chip or the tape over the firewire channel to your
computer. The computer just stores the information it is receiving.

And this is sweet! That is why we all love DV so much. It gives
us a very good/clean/full resolution signal.

Enjoy!

[Adrian Douglas]

The advantages of using a third party card like the Storm don't come into play when capturing but when it comes time to edit then it's a different story.

These third party cards have hardware that allows you to edit in "Real Time" or at least some form of it. You won't get that with a generic Firewire interface card because that's all it is, an interface between your camera and the computer.

It all comes down to how much you need RT capabilities and how long you want to wait while your machine renders your video. With the interface card alone you won't get much in the way of RT, unless you use something like Avid's Xpress DV that is software based RT. Uled Video studio, nada, Premiere, nada, Vegas Video, I think RT preview. Bill will certainely confirm this one.