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How important is a capture card?
Sorry for the newbie question but I was thinking of purchasing a new computer to work with After Effects and was wondering if I was going to need a video capture card as well.
I guess my problem is that I am not sure how it all works. I normally capture video from my camera to premiere from my deck via firewire. I don’t go directly through a video card.
Could someone please enlighten me on the who what where when and whys? Thanks!
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16 Replies
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This is not really an After Effects question, to me, and not really a yes/no question either. It depends on what you want to do.
You should ask yourself some questions, like: Are you capturing 60-80% or more of your own stuff using the setup that’s working for you right now? Is that setup working well? Do you expect it to continue to work well for the foreseeable future, for the work you expect to do? Do you expect you might need to come in from, or go out to, a non-firewire format like BetaSP? Do you expect to be working in any HD formats where the quality difference between SDI and Firewire is notable, and you need the higher quality?
If you’re using your firewire setup for most or all of the capturing you’re doing, and it’s working for you, I’d say spend some of the money you would have spent on a capture card on some extra RAM for your new system, and save the rest in case you do come across the odd project where you need to transfer from another format to something that you can use with your setup. If, however, you expect to be doing a lot of work with BetaSP or with HD material that requires SDI (which is not all HD material by any means), go with the capture card.
It’s really all dependent on what you expect to be doing.
Vague enough answer for you? 🙂
Cheers,
Steve -
I quite agree with Dave regarding the editing application. I have not run into the HDV issue myself as most of the HD work I do is with DVCPRO HD (which has it’s own issues).
Steve
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I would say that if you are doing any broadcast work you should be previewing out of AE via SDI or component to a reference monitor for correct colours, jitter & field issues. Also, if you are working with fields then somesort of output to a CRT monitor would be useful for this reason. Be aware of your safe areas aswell (can be gauged in AE via the overlays, but you can see how it will really look on a CRT via a Decklink or similar.)
Though you could always output all your work to DVD and then view on a TV and then go back and adjust accordingly. Bit of a long round trip but if you want to save money then it’s an option.
AE7 Pro – Nucleo – Mocha v1.2.3 – PS CS3 – FCP 5.1.4
MacPro Quad 3GHz / ATI 1900XT / 8GB RAM / OSX 10.4.11
30″ ACD / Decklink SP / SONY PVM-20M4E/ Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / XServe / United Digital RAID
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Production Studio CS2 – Combustion 3 – Mocha v1.0.1
Win XP Pro 32 / Intel Core2Quad Q6600 / 2GB RAM / NVidia Quadro570 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5s / Sony BVM-20G1E / 2 x Dell 2007FP / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 320GB boot/800GB RAID-0 -
I’m not disputing HDV m2t/mpeg’s are far from ideal formats for compositing.
However I have never had any issues working with them in AE, at least not any issues that are not present in DV, or any other compressed format as well. Of course processing time are longer, do to their more complex high compression, but that’s about it.
An uncompressed workflow is great, sure, but very costly (capture card, lots of hard drive space, hardware raid controller and so on).
Start with what you have, invest your money first in lots of RAM, a good processor and motherboard, and an editing app.
If you feel that you need to, you could always add the capture card later.
You can preview your work on an sd monitor in your editing app via your camera/firewire connection.
If you absolutely need hd monitoring, you can get the Blackmagic card which is quite cheap. It will also let you capture uncompressed via hdmi, but again, remember that you need a fast large raid array to work with uncompressed files. -
“at least not any issues that are not present in DV, or any other compressed format as well. Of course processing time are longer, do to their more complex high compression, but that’s about it. “
Pretty much all video-related applications expect to be able to step through your video one frame at a time. HDV uses interframe compression which means it doesn’t contain a solid string of individual frames from beginning to end. As a result, this trips After Effects up pretty bad, along with MPG4, H.264, MP3s etc. Glad to hear you haven’t noticed any problems, but universally across the board most people report miserable experiences using HDV in any app, especially AE, without first converting it to a working format like uncompressed.
“You can preview your work on an sd monitor in your editing app via your camera/firewire connection.”
You can, but you can’t trust that at all for color correction work, and you definitely can’t trust it for anything that will be shown on TV. Previewing video on a proper broadcast monitor is probably the biggest advantage to getting a capture card. The AJAs and Blackmagic cards offer proper BNC video outs.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
[Brendan Coots] “but universally across the board most people report miserable experiences using HDV in any app, especially AE”
I don’t know on what you are basing this claim. I know of many people, both personally and from forums, that share my experience of not having issues.
I don’t want to offend Dace LaRonde, I am sure he is much more experienced then I am, but declaring flat out that AE DOES NOT PLAY NICE with HDV, is irresponsible in my humble opinion, as someone, based on this advice, may go out and spend cash on a capture card/raid array he dosn’t absolutely need.
Just try it first for yourself!
I have to wonder if there people out there that work in uncompressed who never even tried working with native HDV in AE…[Brendan Coots] ”
“You can preview your work on an sd monitor in your editing app via your camera/firewire connection.”You can, but you can’t trust that at all for color correction work”
Again, I’m not arguing the merits of proper capture card/professional monitor. Someone suggested that you can burn a DVD and view it on your television, and in this case monitoring through your camera is a more efficient solution. It at least allows you to check for interlacing issues, and understand general color differences between your computer screen and TV screen (especially if you are working with LCD screens). The question boils down to what budget you have. Many people are monitoring through camera, and find it an acceptable compromise until they can afford a proper monitoring solution. It certainly is a compromise, that’s true enough.
cheers.
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“I don’t know on what you are basing this claim. I know of many people, both personally and from forums, that share my experience of not having issues.”
It can’t really be disputed – After Effects, FCP and virtually all other video programs dislike interframe-based codecs including HDV. It’s just a known problem with using those formats. I have no reason to try and convince you of anything, work however you please. BUT you should search this forum for “HDV” or, better yet, search Google for “after effects HDV” and see the first link that pops up:
https://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=332583
“I have to wonder if there people out there that work in uncompressed who never even tried working with native HDV in AE…”
You seem to be assuming that people who dislike HDV only work in uncompressed. Your only choices aren’t uncompressed or using a highly compressed interframe codec that was always meant to be a “shooting” format. Converting HDV to just about any other suitable format (such as DVCPRO HD) would work.
If you are working in After Effects, using uncompressed footage would probably deliver BETTER performance than HDV anyway, because of the interframe issue.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Hi Brendan.
(First of all I’d like to mention, everything I say regards working on windows. I have no experience with HDV on the mac, and of any issues on that platform).
You don’t have to convince me that working with HDV mpegs is a compromise. All I am saying, is that it CAN be done, and dogmatically saying it CAN’T is misleading.
The link you gave is really outdated. With a decent new core2duo/quadro processor and enough RAM, AE CS3 performance with m2t in my experience is stable and good enough for most situations, and I have so far done some very complex projects.
Would performance have been better had I worked with uncompressed? I’m sure it would. But for the moment, working with HDV is good enough, and I have more urgent needs than getting a capture card/more hard drives/raid controller.
Of course working with such a highly compressed inter-frame codec is a compromise, but so is working with uncompressed (in terms of hardware cost and/or re-encoding time). It’s up to everyone to work out which workflow works better for their needs/budget.I am unaware of any FREE lossless codecs that will not require raid to run smoothly. Prores is not available without Apple/FCP, people say Cineform is great but it is very costly. Maybe PhotoJpeg 75? that’s still lossy though. If you can suggest a viable alternative, I’d be thankfull.
I know that re-encoding a highly-compressed-shooting-only inter-frame coded (HDV) to a compressed-shooting-only intra-frame codec (DVCPro HD) is NOT something I would do.cheers.
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Hey Donald, I don’t know if you got a satisfactory answer to your question but at least you did spark quite an interesting dispute between heavyweights.
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I’m not trying to argue with you, but this is a debate worth having.
You keep saying that working with uncompressed requires a bunch of special gear but that is just not true. Most of the gear you keep referencing is beneficial in a real-time environment like editing, not a RAM preview system like AE.
In After Effects, you have to load every single preview and output to RAM no matter what the format is. As a result, the only real difference between video format choices is in how long they take to load into RAM, and the question of generational loss. While it can speed things along to have more RAM (with multiprocessing enabled) none of the gear you reference is necessary to work uncompressed.Choice of source format CAN, however, negatively impact render times quite a bit. Because HDV has interframe compression that takes longer for the system to manage, it probably takes as long or longer to render than an uncompressed or lossless file like Animation Codec would. As a result, you are probably BETTER off working uncompressed, fancy gear aside. The only way to know for sure is to do speed tests on your own system.
You say you haven’t noticed any problems working with HDV, but have you timed renders with footage in HDV and the same footage that has been transcoded to a lossless format? Just because you aren’t getting BSODS doesn’t mean you’re not experiencing any downside such as lost productivity.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com
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