capture card replacement

[David Carter]

so I moved to the mac for a bit BUT due to a fundemental flaw in the mac I bought (ie it stopped working) Ive been unable to edit for six months. The mac repair has now become a seperate issue but to get me back on my feet so to speak I have bought a fairly good desktop pc so I can get cracking.

In my previous pc I had an aging yet still fully working dv500 card and break out box from pinnacle. I see theres a couple on ebay just now so was considering buying one. Or a Pinnacle500 DVD card. Can anyone suggest another alternative, or do you think I'm safe to go for the old pinnacle gear?

I'm just out of touch pc wise with capture cards and break out boxes and a quick scan of recent posts here hasnt turned up any advice that I could take on this.

Thanks in advance.

carter

[Ed Smith]

Hi David,

It really depends on what you want to do, and what the specs of your new PC are...

Now a days with the latest PC hardware, you can get away without needing to use a capture card. i.e. most PCs already come with a ieee-1394 port and the realtime aspects of the cards will be pretty useless; as you can do most on a reasonably speced PC.

The capture card benefit is really as an IO device, enabling capture and playout of analogue sources.

Pinnacle have stopped supporting the DV500 cards with Premiere. the only version which will currently work is Premiere 6.5 any newer versions are incompatible.

I have a working DV500 card in my Dell 2.6GHz 1Gig ram and I rarely use it, since running Premiere in software only does what I need it to do. The only time when I do use it is for analogue capture.

hope this helps a little.

[David Carter]

thanks ed, thats the sort of thing i wanted to hear. I think i'll get an external analogue capture card which I can use on both the pc and the new mac when and if it appears... cheers