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!
Hard Drives
If it isn’t obvious by now, you need a really big hard drive. I have an 80 GB hard drive, and I routinely fill it more than half full while capturing AVI files. You need the biggest hard drive you can afford. A 7200 RPM drive is fast enough, but if you can afford a SCSI drive.
Processor
The debate over whether or not you need a single or dual processor system has been fuel for endless flame wars. Personally, since this is going to be an amateur workstation, I would recommend a fast single CPU instead of so-so dual processors. Stay away from the Celeron’s & Duron’s though. They will work of course, but the extra cache in Pentiums & XP’s will help speed up the process. You can pick up a 1.47 ghz AMD chip for $60-$70. My 900 Mhz Duron is really starting to show it’s age when it comes to compressing hours of video. If you can afford a faster processor, go for it. But for 60 bucks that 1.4 ghz chip is a bargain. As a general rule, I always buy a new heat sink/fan whenever I buy a new CPU. That way you are sure that your processor is being cooled adequately.
Motherboard & Case/Power Supply
In my opinion the motherboard is the single most important part of your PC. It is the key component that ties every other component together. When buying new computer parts, I recommend it is the one part that you don’t “get cheap” with. If you do a little research beforehand, you can buy a motherboard that will allow you to have a HUGE amount of upgradeability for the future.
The first thing to decide when buying a new motherboard is whether it’s going to be dual or single processor and whether or not it is going to run an AMD or Intel processor. For the purposes of this article I recommend a single processor. As far as AMD vs Intel, you decide that for yourself. Once you’ve decided on what brand of processor you want, you need to decide what speed & type(Duron/Athlon/XP or Celeron/PIII/PIV) of processor your going to buy. You will also need to make a decision about SDR ram or DDR ram. DDR ram is more expensive, but also provides better performance. You’ll have to decide for yourself if DDR ram is worth the extra money. Whichever type you decide on, buy at least 512MB.
Also, be very careful about the speed of the processor that the motherboard supports. When I bought my motherboard, I ordered it with a 900mhz Duron. I made sure that the motherboard I was ordering supported better/faster CPU’s. My motherboard supports Duron’s/Athlon’s/XP’s. It supports speeds up to about 1.8 ghz(or more, but I don’t feel like digging out the manual to see). When the faster processors become a little cheaper, I’ll double the speed of my processor and never have to worry whether or not my motherboard can handle it. Be certain that your motherboard supports both faster speeds and newer types of processors.
If you expect your computer to be as upgradeable as possible, one of the worst things you can do is buy a motherboard with a) integrated audio/video and b) limited PCI slots. That said, I recommend buying a motherboard with no integrated components (expect maybe a NIC, but even then not really). With any decent motherboard you should get an AGP slot, and 5 to 6 PCI slots. I’ve got a video card(AGP), a 3com NIC, and a Sound Blaster Live! card in my computer right now. The only other thing I can think of ever needed to add would be a modem. That still leaves me with room for a USB 2 card, firewire card or a IDE/SCSI controller, should the need arise.
Now that we’ve picked out which motherboard we need, we pick the case and power supply to match it. Get at least a mid-tower sized case. My case has 4 5.25” bays and 2 3.5” bays. It has plenty of room inside, and has lots of room for extra hard drives or CD/DVD-Roms. When I ordered my case it was bundled with a 350 watt power supply. It has always “supplied” enough power, however if you are going to be powering a lot of devices via firewire & USB I would recommend you go with a 400 watt or higher power supply. Also, pay attention to the fine print on in case descriptions. Some cases and power supplies only support Intel processors, and some only support AMD processors.
For an idea of the money involved in this section, I would say a fair price for the motherboard outlined above would be around $90-$120 depending on how high-end you want to go. For the case, you can probably get a good sturdy case with a 400 watt power supply for $50-60 bucks. Note that the price for the case assumes you get an ugly beige case like I did. Pretty aluminum ones cost more.
Sound Card
There’s really no question about it in my opinion. Creative Labs make great sound cards. You can pick up a Live! sound card for around $35(USD) or an Audigy for around twice that. If you really want to go crazy check out the Audigy 2, which sells from around $110 to $160. It’s worth noting that both the Audigy and Audigy 2 sound cards come with an integrated firewire port.
Memory
Get at least 512MB. If you have the money, go for a gig or more. As for SDR or DDR ram, see above.
Removable Drives
Depending on what you want your final product to be, will be what determines what kind of removable drive you buy. If your going to be making Video CD’s(VCD’s) or Super Video CD’s(SVCD’s) then you need to get a CD-R(W). If you want to burn DVD’s, you need to look into buying a DVD burner. The different DVD formats are discussed below.
DVD Formats
There seems to be a lot of confusion on the ‘Net about the competing DVD standards. I would logically assume that if your going to be working with large amount of video’s at home(or at work) that you aren’t going to want to span them across a whole spindle of Video CD’s. That’s where DVD-Writer’s come in. By burning your video to DVD’s you can hand out one or two disc to family & friends instead of a one or two stacks. The 5 most common formats are: DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW.
DVD-RAM: Best used for back-up purposes. It’s not really compatible with stand alone DVD players. Not recommended storing video’s that you want to play on anything other than a computer.
DVD-R: Compatible with most stand alone DVD players. Can only be written to once.
DVD+R: Compatible with most stand alone DVD players. Can only be written to once.
DVD-RW: Can be erased and used several times. Similar to CD-RW discs in that they can be written to many times. Some new DVD players can read this type of disc, but older DVD players can not.
DVD+RW: Can be erased and used several times. Similar to CD-RW discs in that they can be written to many times. Some new DVD players can read this type of disc, but older DVD players can not.
As you can see, there are several in-compatible formats. Currently there is no “universal” format. Personally that is the reason I have not purchased a DVD recorder. What’s the point of spending all of that time & money to archive the video on a format that has not standardized? You run the risk of having all your hard work being rendered incompatible. However if you need the capability of DVD writer, you need to do your research before buying. Below you will find a link to an online database that keeps track of DVD players and what formats they support.
Conclusion
I hope that I’ve given you a good place start. Following the above guidelines will get you setup and editing your video in no time. Expect an article that covers the software side of things in while. I have had wonderful success buying computer parts from www.newegg.com. I am not an employee, or sales rep or anything other than a very happy customer. They are a reputable site, with great prices and great service. Give them a try.
About the Author:
Nathan Mace is a recent graduate of the University of Charleston. He is interested in BSD/Linux operating systems, OS-X, digital video and photography, and generally anything geeky. I can be reached at [email protected]
Editor’s Reminder: By buying or even just by clicking-through to a merchant via the virtual aisles of PriceGrabber’s OSNews price comparison shop, you help OSNews financially.
Where did you go to high school? I went to Capital. I’m surprised to see someone online that I could actually run into in real life. Eugenia don’t be mad, I clicked on an ad.
I don’t mean to be critical, especially because someone wrote an article about this type of thing – we never talk about stuff like this and it’s good to see it here.
Having said that, the author passed over the easy and inexpensive way of doing this because he said he didn’t know anything about how to do it that way. Then proceeds to tell how to do it the hard and expensive way.
Please believe me, I’m not shilling for Apple here, but this is a great example of why Macs (let’s say an iMac) are not expensive. No going out and buying capture cards and sound cards…and the author hasn’t even spoken of software yet. Buy an iMac and one of those VCR-to-Firewire port do-dads and you’re in business. The hardware and software are all in one package.
I am looking forward to Part 2 though very much. I love reading about successful projects like this.
I like this article, the author put in a lot of thought. I would just like to add my opinions.
He mentions getting a good motherboard for $90-$120 and a case for about $50.
If you, like me, like design and finish I would recommend going for a Shuttle SS51G for your video editing needs.
Here is a quick link for the needy.
http://us.shuttle.com/specs2.asp?pro_id=76
The device has Firewire and USB 2.0. It looks great and performs well. It even has room for a fullsize AGP graphics card, the ATI All In Wonder springs to mind.
Warning though: Building one of these is not for the faint of heart. The space is cramped and cables need to be layed out precisly.
Cram in 512MB Ram and a 2Ghz+ P4 and 7200 RPM 120GB drive and you have a small stylish Video machine. Now add a Flatpanel to complete the picture.
And don’t forget to use virtualdub: http://www.virtualdub.org
Have a nice editing time.
Michael
Weird; I’ve just spent the last week doing just this!
On the wife’s machine (Windows 98SE, with the words “If you $#@!&ing touch my machine and change it again, I’m going to $#@$!$# – hence, it still has Windows 98SE on it. Of course, she hasn’t noticed the various hard drive, memory and video card upgrades I’ve done in the last couple of weeks. No – that’s *6* Gig free, dear, not 60… I don’t know why the screen runs so much smoother. It sure couldn’t have anything to do with the piece of shit S3 Savage that I just replaced with a GeForce4 while you were sleeping…)
*cough* Where was I?
Oh yeah, I haven’t had the budget to up her CPU yet (A Duron 600), so I found I was limited in the sort of software I could use.
Virtualdub is your friend, especially for a low-end CPU. Capture to some loss-less compression (such as HuffyUV or MJPEG) and drop to a lower audio level (such as 16-bit, 32K) After all, we’re talking VHS here, and quality is pretty up the –
By doing this, you’ve just made it possible to completely thrash the amount of hard drive space you are using up. You can convert to your favourite compression standard *coughdivx* later (after remembering to de-interlace, of course!)
I made do with a cheap’n’nasty “TV Excel” card, based on the BT898. It cost ~AUD$50 (read: USD$2.50)
If you’ve got a Windows box and a decent CPU (ie, if it’s >1Ghz, it’s gotta be a PIII or an Athlon – a Duron just can’t cut it!) then have a look at WinDVR by Intervideo – it can do timeshifting as well as record straight to MPEG 2 in real-time. There’s even a bundle with a USB tuner.)
http://www.intervideo.com/jsp/Product_Profile.jsp?p=WinDVR
There’s also plenty of advice on divx-digest and similar pages.
it’s not really strange, kinda funny actually that everyone is mentioning VirutalDub. I love that app! And I plan to go over it in the next part of the article.
As for the comment about the Mac….*sigh* yes i know. i wish i had bought a mac. but i caught the mac “bug” shortly after i bought this new PC. it didn’t make much sense to buy a $2000 Mac to do video capture/editing when i could buy a $200 video card for my PC and do pretty much the same thing. it’s not that i don’t want or don’t like macs…..it just didn’t make sense(money wise) to do it that way at this point it time…..
Mike…..you went to UC too??? I’m not a native of Charleston, just someone who moved here to go to school. Have we ever met in real life?
Nathan
I really wish there were top notch, easy to use, video editing tools in Linux. I’ve tried all the ones out there but there is nothing super easy like DVD Movie Factory or something like that.
The author skipped the analog-firewire converters because he has no experience with them. I would suggest them as the better solution (than a capture card) for a number of reasons.
The primary reason is that there are no drivers to worry about. I used to have a capture card from Miro/Pinnacle – but since they release new models, they tend to drop driver support for older ones. Getting my card to work in Win2k was possible, but XP wouldn’t have been possible – as they’ve discontinued support.
I sold my capture card and purchased a Canopus ADVC-100 instead. The box plugs into the firewire port and the computer sees it as a DV camera. All I have to do is plug any analog source into it, and it automatically converts to DV. Very simple.
Additionally – many capture cards are unidirectional. They capture only. Some do output back to analog, but not all do. The analog-firewire devices allow you to output back to analog (regular VCR or TV set) directly from the timeline of your video editing app (as long as the app supports DV – but any modern editor does.)
Another nicety for me – I use Sonic Foundry Vegas Video, which supports video preview out over the firewire card. This way, I can attach a TV monitor to the ADVC-100 and see the preview image over an actual NTSC monitor (instead of on the computer screen.) This is nice for more accurately determining safe zones and colors (although a vectorscope should be used for precise color adjustment).
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I’d hate anyone to read the article and pass on what I feel is the better hardware solution for most people, simply because the author doesn’t have experience with it.
There are a number of different makers of these devices, Canopus, Sony, Formac, Dazzle, etc. I’d do usenet searches to see what works best for your system and needs.
Another analog-DV method is to get a DV camera that supports analog pass-through. Then you get the ability to shoot in DV – but use the camera to convert analog footage to DV when necessary. This option may not have the ability to do the output back to analog – but you could output back to DV then connect the analog connectors of the camera to your analog device and make a recording. You’d have to check the capabilities of each camera to determine that.
Why buy a Mac when you can get a firewire card for USD$50 or so, and software for USD$100-200 or free if you go with opensource. Of course if your looking for a new system then a Mac might be an option.
Viewcast Osprey cards are pretty sweet for video capturing. I’ve seen a pretty high resolution capture that had excellent quality.
CDNow sells them for pretty decent prices:
http://www.cdw.com/shop/tools/sbb/vendor.asp?ManufactureID=6122
At least, pretty decent prices for a rather high-end video capture card. You can start running into the thousands of dollars for hardware here if you want good quality.
Also, I also have just seen some pretty impressive stuff in Real’s new .rmvb format. The quality is _tons_ better than DivX for the same file format, as long as you don’t mind keeping your video in a proprietary format. Oh yeah, you can get a copy of an encoder that does rmvb for free here:
http://www.realnetworks.com/products/producer/index.html
Guess I was a little slow there. hehe Good post Splinky, you got me by five seconds.
Nice article, but a few suggestions based on my own experience:
I run a very similar setup to the authors: 8500DV video card, 1.2 Ghz AMD, 512MB DDR Ram, SB Audigy, etc.
If you’re going to use your setup for live TV, and/or pausing live TV (like a Tivo), make sure you download the latest drivers for your Audigy! Earlier drivers had a problem in that you could not mute & unmute the line-in while watching live video (a must for show shifting, or “pausing” live video).
If you’re buying a new drive for this, I’d highly reccomend going with one of Western Digitals “Special Edition” drives. These come with 8MB of cache on them, and are only slightly more than their smaller cache offereings (I just bought one last week for a PC I’m building for someone and the 80GB Special Edition drive was only like $25 more than the regular 80GB drive.
Another consideration for drives is the warranty. Western Digital’s still offering a 3 year warranty on these “SE” drives whereas many newer drives (both WD’s and others) are cutting their warranty’s length down to a year.
One more thing to consider (There’s many more, but I’m sure that this and others will likely be covered in future updates to this article) is how do you want to output your video?
As the author points out, you have many options: DVD and VCD in the digital arena, VCR and other analog tape formats and methods, but depending on your needs, you might be able to save room, and retain quality by using some type of compression and saving it for display on PC’s.
If this option sounds good for your particular needs, then you get to decide what format you want to standardize on: Divx, Mpg, AVI, Window Media(Boo!), Quicktime, and so on…
There’s a lot of issues to discuss when it comes to video formats also; I’d start with the forums of http://www.showshifter.com if you want to get an idea of what others are doing (Showshifter deals specifically with TV recording, but the codec discussions apply here; Additionally they cover a lot of hardware & software issues you’ll be dealing with if you decide to go this route).
If you do go with one of the aforementioned formats, you can do some fairly neat things though. One thing that comes to mind is a auto running menu which would not only give your viewers a preview of what they’re about to see, but could also tie in additional information, sound, and/or links to relevant information on the web -Possibly even your home page. Keep in mind also that if you use the right software (AutoPlay Menu Generator 4 works great!), you can integrate Flash video and Audio, as well as javascript and/or HTML, with your presentation.
The only downside to choosing a “computer based” format is that you’ll have to have a PC to play them back on. While this might open your audience up a bit (over say a DVD, since not everyone yet has a DVD player), it might also limit the appeal if your audience isn’t comfortable with sitting in front of a PC to watch a video. The plus side is that more and more of us are attaching PC’s to our big screens, and there’s whispered rumors of DVD players which will support Divx playback. If this ever happened, I’d be hard pressed to put things out as mpeg2 when a Divx will offer better quality with less space being used.
My two cents…
Well, I talked about getting a Mac but, if you’re really building your own system, then that would be less expensive, a real challenge and, no doubt, a lot of fun too.
My Dad wants to do somthing similar but I don’t know what simple tools are available for Linux. He dosn’t want anything really complex, just to be able to do dumb stuff like cut, audio dub, add credits and highlight particular people. What kind of good software is available for Linux?
For osnews webmaster:
The “printer friendly” version of the article crashed mozilla 1.1. I haven’t check on other articles though…
I hate to say it but a simple review of this story by an editor would have led to the correction of a couple errors and made the article that much better.
Some prgs to look at.
film-gimp aided in Scooby-doo. Cinelerra , rpm format.
Ogle,MPlayer,xanim,xine various players. Also broadcast 2000.
Heres a link , I’m looking for 1394 capable card for Linux and Win.
http://www.linux1394.org/cgi-bin/hcl.cgi
You can pick up a firewire card for your PC that works with linux for about $30. Use dvgrab and the ieee1394 kernel modules and you’re set. The problems I have had are getting proper DV codecs to manipulate the video once it has been ripped. Transcode is supposed to be an excellent program for this, but I’m too lazy to test it right now. I tend to use windows for that stuff. There are plenty of video editting links on doom9.org for windows. Also a removable IDE drive bay makes things much nicer, so you can record several full VHS tapes before putting away the equipment and moving on to editting.
>The “printer friendly” version of the article crashed mozilla 1.1. I haven’t check on other articles though…
This is a known bug of Mozilla. It crashes randomly throughout OSNews, but not for all users. A Mozilla developer had a look and could not reproduce, but we know that there is a definite bug on Mozilla.
Seriously, for low end video work, save yourself the time and hassle of a PC and get a Mac. iMovie and FC Pro are better than any sub $5000 PC editing programs, and they ‘just work.’ Hell, my grandma can make movies with iMovie, and she doesn’t even use email.
Well I do this on the Windows side, with a Pinnacle ADVC card.
And “PLENTY” of disk space. Unfortunately with Linux just the Firewire port is usable, but as another poster suggested you can go with a Firewire camcorder, with a good locking capability. The Sonys come highly recommended. Also check all the groups out there that specialize in this for tips and tricks for getting the best results.
The author pointed out that DV will take ~3.5 Mb worth of space for every second of video … but most ‘capture cards’ don’t capture in DV. They capture in MPEG, MJPEG, or raw uncompressed (a few pro boards). The bitrates for these formats may vary, depending on what resolution you are capturing in, and the quality setting. My old MJPEG card would require about 7Mb/sec at its highest quality setting at 704×480.
For DV – which runs at about 3.5Mb/sec – you can quite often get away with a 5400 RPM drive, but it isn’t recommended. I also didn’t see in the article that you should be doing your video editing/capturing on a separate drive. While this isn’t required, it may be to your advantage, so that no other processes try to access the disk while a capture is in process. If something slows the drive down (like another program using the swap file) it could cause dropped frames.
Again, this isn’t always necessary – I’ve captured DV to my primary (system/OS) drive (7200RPM) without dropped frames, but YMMV. The best setup would be to have a dedicated video drive (preferably on its own channel on the controller) so as to leave as much IO bandwidth available to the capture.
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Re: Mac vs. PC
This is a bit premature, as the software side of things hasn’t been discussed yet. But there is good software on both sides of the fence. I’d guess that a lot of the cheap/freebie software that comes with capture cards for the PC is crap. Don’t know. I haven’t used it. I have my own copies of Premiere and Vegas Video, so I don’t need the cheapo stuff. This is probably an area where Mac shines, in that iMovie pretty much eliminates the need for cheapo editors on the Mac side.
But once you get into the need for something more sophisticated than the freebie editors, you’ll find that Premiere works basically the same cross platform, as does the software from Avid. If you’re doing video full time, you may want to use FCP because your clients do, but then again, you may want to use Avid because it integrates with online edit suites better.
For my editing needs, I’m partial to the interface in Vegas, but they’ll all get the work done.
I’d like to see more editing software for Linux/BSD … but that’s only because I think competition is good. I can’t say I’m in any way dissatisfied with my current setup – and it’s basically an appliance.
Back in the old days of e-to-e cuts only edits on 3/4 umatic tape decks, I didn’t worry about what was inside the tape mechanism – it was just a machine, and the computer is pretty much the same. As long as I can get my work done reasonably efficiently, I don’t care what company collects the money for my box.
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Also, just in general. There seems to be a disconnect as to what people mean by “video editing” – it seems to a lot of people, it means capturing and converting video. (ie. ripping a movie and making a DivX copy)
That’s not what I would consider editing. Editing, to me, is the process of taking clips and assembling them to tell a story. So when I see people saying things like ‘you should use virtualdub for editing’ it gives me pause. Virtualdub is a good video processor. It can do some very basic editing in the sense it can trim single clips, but it isn’t designed for assembling sequences of clips, etc.
From the virtualdub website VirtualDub isn’t an editor application; it’s a pre- and post-processor that works as a valuable companion to one
my $0.02
I’d avoid ATI’s all-in-wonder cards for two reasons. The first is the driver crappiness that ATI is known for. While they’ve largely fixed the problems with just their video drivers themselves, the capture drivers are still pretty flaky (used to be able to consistently hard lock my win2k box by using the ATI TV app with my AIW Pro.
The second reason is that with the AIW cards, it’s more of a hassle to upgrade your video card (in that you have to buy another all in wonder, or you lose your capture abilities). Personally, my preference in a stand-alone video capture card, then it won’t make any difference what your display adapter is.
And from some of the responses and also my own opinion, doing video editing on the mac is very easy.
iMovie is a nice starter app that comes with.
AND, you can get a new eMac,17 inch flat screen crt,700 G4,firewire,cd rw,dvd r for 870 $US- plus 50 $ for 512 m more ram.
Not bad (and not the 2000 mentioned earlier)
I do NOT want to start any flame wars, just looking for info. You mentioned a couple of s/w packages, did you try or is it worth it to try the Windows Movie Maker that is part of Win XP?
windows movie maker is slightly “OK” as long as you are wanting to export the movie as a windows media file. thats all it exports
Nathan
Good article, sounds like your having fun fugured everything out. My short story is this…about 3 yrs ago I was running a 200 meg pentium and had the same idea of editing video. At the time there were no pc’s were standard running apple’s firewire. I looked at other cards for my computer but in-short I decided to get a imac because Apple just came out with a dv model with imovie and firewire.
My next computer will be another mac, because I just dig Final Cut Pro. The program is much easier to learn and more powerful then premiere. Plus if you are a student you can get the student version cheaper then premiere 6.5. Have fun!
cheers
I have used both iMovie(on my iBook) and the windows Movie Maker( XP ATHLON) and by far the Apple software works better and easier to navigate. Too bad the MAC cannot play games 🙂
“I’d avoid ATI’s all-in-wonder cards for two reasons. The first is the driver crappiness that ATI is known for. While they’ve largely fixed the problems with just their video drivers themselves, the capture drivers are still pretty flaky (used to be able to consistently hard lock my win2k box by using the ATI TV app with my AIW Pro. ”
I’ll second that. I’ve had several problems with the ATI capture drivers…
Sony Vaio VX88 has everything you need for video editing just like Macs, and still cost far more less than comparable Mac laptops. So I don’t think that Apple is cheaper for these goals.
The article would be much better if it did talk about the software. I don’t have VHS tapes, so that’s not interesting for me.
I’ve had a Radeon 64DDR VIVO since they came out. I’ve never had problems with capturing video. I’ve had Win98, Win2k, XP, and various distros of linux. Maybe I’m just lucky.
Hi guys,
I have a lot of experience with video editing. I have been converting and piecing together video for all types of projects (wedding shots, old VHS recordings, advertising, etc). I’ve used PC’s and Mac’s and have used both analog video capture cards and Firewire DV converter boxes. By far the best way to capture and edit video is to use Firewire (IEEE 1394) with a DV converter box to hook up your analog video connections. With a good converter box like Sony’s DVMC-DA2 (which I’m currently using) and at least 2 dedicated hard drives for video (I use 6 IBM Deskstar HD’s because Western Digital HD’s are no where near as reliable as IBM’s from my own experience) you can do a lot more than you can with an analog capture card. For example, with an analog capture card, you would need to capture about 7 – 9 MB per second of video to get comparable video quality to DV’s 3.7 MB/sec capture rate. For the short of it, you are capturing the same or better quality at half the file size. Which means twice as much capture time and less of a chance to drop frames or partial frames (with analog capture cards I dropped frames all the time and I’m not in the business to have to re-capture whole projects every time I loose some frames) because most drives can handle the measly 3.7 MB/sec capture rate that DV requires.
As far as what system to use, mac or pc, I strongly recommend an Apple Macintosh. Whether using a laptop or a desktop, there simply isn’t a better combination of hardware and software that can beat the Macintosh for the price/performance of the hardware/software combination or the power and time savings of the highly efficient software packages like Apple’s Final Cut Pro or free iApps like iMovie and iDVD. Like all of you may already know, Microsoft’s free apps are not worth the hard drive space they occupy, might as well delete Windows Media Player outright, it’s horrible. Most of the apps this discussion has been mentioning are just for capturing and converting. So forget about adding soundtracks or using cool transitions, the most these apps will give you are simple and inaccurate cut and paste video editing.
With all video work, there are always 4 things you need to do: capture the video, edit the video, export/convert the video, and create the media.
iMovie (free) or FCP ($300 at Apple’s education store for students or $1000) can do the first 3, iDVD (free) will do the last (and rather easily if I may add
Now, being a computer consultant by trade, I always look at what people need to do with their computers before I recommend what products to buy. If this article was all about what computer system best meets the needs of a gamer, than I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend a good PC with a strong video card like a GeForce 4 or ATI’s 9700. But since this article has to do with capturing and editing video, I know that the Mac can’t be beat. For example, just ask many of the people who have purchased Sony laptops or even desktops just to turn around and say there junk because of the endless driver problems they’re having trying to get all the multimedia capabilities to work together. Not to mention that Sony’s Firewire compatible interface, iLink, doesn’t even supply power so you better be sure to buy peripherals with power adapters. With Apple, I have never had a problem. The software and hardware were made for each other. Oh, did I mention that I currently do all my video work on a more than 2-year-old 400 MHZ Apple Powerbook G3? It works great. All of my peripherals can be driven off Firewire bus power so I can truly go portable without the need for any power outlets. Which means I can edit video on an airplane (this saved me one time, trust me, it’s an awesome capability)
In no way am I trying to advocate Mac’s over PC’s, I have both. And I definitely do not work for Apple. I can just say from my own experience that they work much better for this type of work.
I really hope this information helps.
I’m looking forward to reading the future additions to this article because digital video really intrigues me. I just love doing this work and I hope you all will too.
Adamation’s personalStudio is iMovie for PC but better.
As for hardware just get a mobo (e.g shuttle) with onboard firewire, video (unless you want to play games), and sound. Plug in a 80gb hard disk & a stick of 256mb ram. That’s the hardwork done.