Best video card?

[Michael Sacci]

Video cards are AJA and Blackmagic cards for capturing and monitoring video to a TV.

What you are ask about are Graphic cards. FCP at this time doesn’t use the graphic card for anything HD. AJA helps process HDV and DVCProHD with there inside cards. Why would you be considering (4) cards? we that no only not help anything it will hurt you with apps like Color. Now Color and Motion use the graphic cards to speed up rendering and playback processing.

[Jason Brown]

I’m having a new system built and referring to the system video card…not an I/O card for monitoring, like the AJA, BlackMagic…etc.

So I guess what you are saying is that it isn’t an issue and there’s not much effect from what video card goes in.

And…4x refers to the speed, not the number of cards.

-Jason

[Michael Sacci]

The card that displays the computers desktop and apps is a GRAPHICS card. The cards you are referring to are not VIDEO cards, they are GRAPHIC cards, that is a common mistake but in tech boards and when asking questions it is important to be referring to the right thing.

My point about bringing up the AJA cards is that it does offer some help with those two flavors of HD within FCP.

[Jason Brown] “And…4x refers to the speed, not the number of cards.”
In the Apple store the card listed as “4x NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB” is (4) of the same card.

The ATI HD 4870 would be a faster card, but at this time FCP would not gain anything from it, but Motion and Color would. In the near feature Snow Leopard would also.

[Ed Dooley]

The 4870 is an inexpensive upgrade for a much faster card. I went for it. As Michael said, it won’t help FCP (yet), but it will, and it does help other apps.
Ed