what is the best video capture cRD FOR PROTOOLS HD ?

[David Jones]

What is your budget?
Do you have PCI card space left in your old G4?
Are you planning to upgrade to a G5 at some point?
What type of inputs and outputs do you need,
(IE) what will you be digitizing from, Beta SP, DVCam, VHS, HD?
What video quality are you looking for?
If high quality, do you have a Raid for video playback seperate from your audio drives?
What is the intended use of the video card?

[Designer]

What is your budget?
from 2000 to 3000 US Dollars

Do you have PCI card space left in your old G4?
Yup

Are you planning to upgrade to a G5 at some point?
No

What type of inputs and outputs do you need,
(IE) what will you be digitizing from, Beta SP, DVCam, VHS, HD?
Digibeta & Beta SP

What video quality are you looking for?
Offline Quality , Comprresed

What is the intended use of the video card?
Audio Syncing with video for Dramas , cartoon and so on ..

[David Jones]

Since you have no plans to upgrade to a modern G5 with PCI-X slots,
my first thought would be to score a used PCI video capture card off ebay.
There are many for sale very cheap, that still have OSX drivers available for them.

[Francois Stark]

I would suggest a Decklink extreme card. This card can capture from SDI or Component to DV or MJPEG compressed, as well as uncompressed formats, and has a feature in the driver which will alow you to play out the quicktime player (an thus any quicktime app such as Pro Tools) to composite, component or SDI. When you move to a G5, the card will still work, but you will likely run out of PCI slots, since the G5 only has three.

We are using old DC-30 cards in two G4 based pro tools systems. They work with a custom driver written by 5 squared (italian company? – writing from memory here) and can do everything mentioned above except SDI or component in/out or uncompressd. They work extremely well with their own off-line half-res movies, which are very space efficient, but don’t look very clean. They also capture to DV and play it out very well.

Most of our workflow is to edit in DV res on our FCP suites, render the final timeline completely, and export as a self contained DV file for video, together with the OMFI for audio. This gets sent over the Pro Tools suite, which uses the DC30 card to mix to the video without having to capture it first.

The DC30 card will not work in a G5 at all, since it is 5V PCI and the G5 has 3.3V PCI slots – physically incompatible. Don’t even try it. You WILL mess up the G5.

The edit FCP systems still plays out the video to Beta SP (since the DC30 does not have component out), and the pro tools suite lays down the audio to the same tape when they’re finished.

Regards
Francois

[Designer]

thanks alot guys 🙂