Recently I decided that it would be a good idea for me to convert several old home videos from VCR tape to a digital format. I knew enough about video capturing/editing to have a basic idea of the hardware requirements, but regarding software (editing/converting), I didn’t really know where to start. This article is for anyone who is interested in working with digital video, but isn’t sure how to get started.With digital camcorder’s and PC’s becoming better and cheaper every day, there are more and more people who fit into this category. This article is divided into two main sections, hardware and software. This is the hardware section, which will help someone who is just getting into the digital video scene decide on a machine to do their editing on. The software article, which should be finished soon, will help readers decide what to do with the video once it’s on their machine, and how to do it.
Hardware
As you might imagine working with digital video can stress nearly every component of your computer. Think of digital video as a strip of still images. We all know that it’s nothing at all for a single high quality photo to be at least 1 MB in size. Now think about your high quality video, it can consist of 30 of those still images(also known as frames) in one second of video! The DV(digital video) format used by many of today’s digital camcorder’s uses around 3.6 MB per second of video. That means an hours worth of video will consume almost 13 GB of hard drive space! It will take something a lot better than your 4 year old PC with it’s 300 mhz processor and 8 GB hard drive to provide you with decent results/performance! Hence the need for a powerful computer. This article will give reader’s an idea about what kind of computer they will need to achieve satisfactory results. The guidelines provided by this article are intended for people who can buy the components and assemble them. If you don’t want to or can’t do this, the guidelines can just as easily be applied to Dell’s(or any other OEM) “build to own” online store.
Hardware needs: Video Capture Card, Hard Drive, Processor, Sound Card, RAM, Removable Drives, Motherboard.
Video Card
To convert your analog video(VHS) to a digital format you will need a way to digitize it. There are products out there that are basically boxes that you plug one side of into your VCR and the other side into your firewire port and it does all the “magic” invisibly. However I don’t have any experience with any of those, so I’ll stick to video capture cards.
There are several advantages(and a few disadvantages) to getting a video capture card for your computer. One of the advantages of buying a capture card for your computer is that they tend to be pretty beefy video cards. This is a “good” thing if your also a gamer. Depending on what one you decide to get, the price could vary anywhere from $100 to $400. I personally have a ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 DV. I paid around $240 for it about 3-4 months ago. It has 64 megs of dedicated video RAM, digital output for newer LCD’s(it comes with a converter so you can use it with regular CRT monitors), S-Video input, RCA input, and co-ax input(TV tuner) as well as RCA and s-video output. It’s also worth nothing that if your computer doesn’t have firewire port, this particular video card also comes with one of those, which will come in handy when I buy a digital camcorder. I highly recommend the ATI line of All-In-Wonder cards. That said the biggest disadvantage to having this card(or any card opposed to a stand alone converter) is that you have to depend on drivers for a lot of your performance(I assume the stand alone video capture boxes don’t have this problem, if that isn’t correct someone please let me know). Although this applies to all video capture cards, it seems that ATI has a problem with this in particular.* If you buy the newest card on the market, chances are that the card hasn’t been out long enough for the drivers get the bugs worked out. For example, the drivers that shipped with my card weren’t the best in the world. It had this annoying habit of dropping a few frames constantly, and would drop a lot of frames if I tried to do the slightest thing while it was capturing(like clicking on the start menu). According to the date on the drivers, ATI released new drivers for this card in June. Thankfully they work MUCH better. The software that shipped with my card is useful, but as we’ll see later there are better alternatives.
If you are planning on working with video from a DV camcorder, you don’t need a capture card. The video from a DV camera is downloaded via a firewire cable. You only need a video capture card if you plan on working with video that is stored in an analog format such as VHS tapes. If you don’t need a capture card, you can buy a very good ATI or NVIDIA video for a fraction of the cost of a capture card.
Note: I was installing an AIW 7500 the other day and after I installed the drivers that came on the CD, I downloaded and installed the newest drivers from ATI’s site. After that the capture software that came with that card will not work. It seems that the warning on ATI’s site about not changing drivers unless there was a real reason to was right on the money. So as far as ATI’s cards go, if you don’t have a problem with your current drivers, don’t change them!
- "Video Editing Basics, Part I"
- "Video Editing Basics, Part II"
- "Video Editing Basics, Part III"
