Video Capture Card
Video capture cards let you record video from camcorder or VCR onto your computer's hard drive. These cards use hardware and/or software compression (codec) to digitize the video onto your hard drive.

While it is the video editing software that lets you actually create and edit the video, it is the video capture card that determines the quality of your video.

Which is Better, Hard or Soft CODEC?

One thing to keep in mind is that "hard" vs. "soft" doesn't matter when it comes to video quality, both give excellent result when working properly.

Speaking of speed, in early 1998, various vendors claimed a 25% or 30% speed advantage of hard codec over soft codec. Too much depends on other factors, like the speed of the computer's CPU, bus and bus interface chipset, to decisively say that one codec will be faster than the other in effects rendering. As CPUs and buses speed up over time, the soft codec have taken the lead in speed for rendering operations.

However, hard codes do have some advantages sometimes depending on your requirements. Hard codec systems usually come with breakout boxes that include analog (composite, Y/C, or even component) connections as well as 1394 connections. You can connect up any VTR format with analog I/O to the box and capture it in real-time or output to it in real-time.

Another very cool feature that many hardware based capture cards now have is real-time features such as transitions, FX, filters, titling and more. You do not have to render, these effects play directly from the timeline. Not everything is in real-time with these cards. Each real-time card comes with its own special selection of real-time features.

Rendering

Normally, before your edited video can be played back to tape, the computer has to "render" or "make" the finished movie as a single separate video file. Once this new file is created, you can play it back anytime you like. The rendering process takes up a lot of computer power and time. The more titles, effects and filters you add, the more processing power, speed and time will be needed to create the finished video. This is the area where more RAM and a faster processor can really make a difference.

What Additional Equipment You Need NLE

Besides computer, you will need:
• A video capture card to digitize and output videos
• Editing software to create all the amazing effects
• Lots of extra storage space for video clips
Most capture cards can be purchased as bundles with NLE software included.

How Much Hard Drive Space Do You Need?

Simply put, you will need a lot. The higher the resolution you need the more space the video will require. Fortunately, hard drives are getting faster and cheaper. For DV footages, you'll need 13GB per hour of raw video. If you plan on doing DVD authoring, you'll need the same amount of space for that. For the best results and highest video quality, you need a dedicated video storage. This can be a big, fast EIDE ATA66/100 drive for basic DV editing, or a Media Video RAID, SCSI drive or Promise Fast Track RAID for long format real-time productions.

What is Timeline Playback

Timeline Playback technology has been implemented by most of the leading hardware/software vendors. This new technology allows you to play video directly from the timeline. All transitions and effects are rendered into temp files and then the entire video is played out without rendering a new, second video file. This also decreases the time required to render the new video file dramatically if you really need to create a separate file.
INSTANT video, Power Play and Cut List, as different vendors call it, are all basically the same thing, timeline playback.

Real-Time Non-Linear Editing (NLE)

Real-time NLE means that you can play video directly from the timeline and that the transitions, filters and effects do not have to be rendered. Since you do not have to render, these systems save you both time and disk space. Real-time technology is a combination of hardware, software, special drivers and the speed and power of your computer. The most important factor is the capture card.
Not everything in real-time cards is real-time. Each real-time card comes with its own special selection of real-time transitions and effects. Some of the newer, less expensive cards offer real-time output for analog, but require rendering for DV/FireWire output. The effects and transitions you get that are real-time will vary from product to product, depending on how the engineers have implemented their real-time technology.
These cards do have specific hardware requirements. If you add enough layers, filters, effects, and titles, you'll exceed the system's capacity for real-time performance. But don't worry, there won't be anything funny. The system will just have to render some parts of the video before playing it back.

Upload Video Clips on the Web

If you want your visitors to download the clips before viewing, you can export the clips using any codec’s and put it on the web just as normal downloadable files. This way, you can provide high quality videos to your audience.

Choosing the proper codec’s is the most critical task for this method. Also you need to test and set the resolution, frame rate and compression rate carefully to limit the file size and download time. In addition, you have to make sure that your audiences have the same codec’s to decompress the video. If you want to stream video on the web, you've got to compress it into one of 3 formats:
• RealPlayer
• Microsoft MediaPlayer
• Apple QuickTime

All three of these formats have strengths and weaknesses.
Streaming video technologies like RealPlayer require special servers and software. Also special HTML coding is often needed.

Either way, the key to good web video is to start with high quality video. Although the video will be squeezed down to fit over the nets limited bandwidth, the more data you give the compressor to work with, the higher quality the finished product will be.

Install the Capture Cards

Installing capture cards, as well as other boards, in your PC is really very easy. You may not even need a screwdriver! Once the card is installed, you will need to install the special driver that comes with it.

Digital video editing is far more complicated than using word processing programs. You have to know the technical stuff. You are going nowhere if you don't even bother installing the cards by yourself.

MPEG-2, MJPEG and MPEG-1

MPEG2 compression is what Hollywood uses when they make a DVD. MPEG2 video quality is scalable, and it can be just as good as or better than DV. It is a much more efficient compression than DV or MJPEG, so you can maintain video quality at 1/2 the data rate!!

We are on the brink of a video revolution that is going to make digital video production easier, faster and less expensive. MPEG2 is the first video compression that supports non-linear editing for all formats of video. VHS, 8mm, Hi8, SVHS, DV, DVC Pro on up to broadcast quality. The only drawback to MPEG2 is that its file structure makes it much more difficult (and therefore expensive) to edit. That is why so many of our DV NLE systems now allow you to export MPEG2 files for DVD authoring, but very few will let you edit MPEG2. Once you have MPEG2 video files, they can be put on CD-ROM, Video CD, and DVD or you can stream it over the Internet. It looks like it's going to be the Holy Grail of digital videography. All that's been missing is an affordable way to burn DVDs.

Back in the 90s, if you wanted to edit video, your best choice was an MJPEG based video capture card. The lower the compression, the larger the file size, and the higher the video quality.

The big decision you have to make with MJPEG is the size/compression/quality trade off. We consider SVHS quality to be full screen capture, 30 frames per second, both fields at compression ratios lower than 6:1. At this rate you will get a little over 5 minutes of video (with stereo audio) per gig. Video at this quality requires hard drives that can sustain data throughput over 3.5 megs per second.

MJPEG cards often support 1/2 or 1/4 screen capture as well. These formats are good for multimedia or VHS editing because you get more video per gig. The downside of these smaller capture sizes is that the card ends up having to recreate the missing info so you can end up with artifacts and blurred colors.
MPEG-1 has been a good choice for creating multimedia or web based video. Unlike MJPEG, MPEG-1 is designed to pack a large amount of good quality video into a small file. Current versions of Win95 include an MPEG-1 player, so any one can take your MPEG-1 files and play them on their computer. This makes MPEG-1 ideal for creating video CD ROMs and multimedia.

Install the Capture Cards

Installing capture cards, as well as other boards, in your PC is really very easy. You may not even need a screwdriver! Once the card is installed, you will need to install the special driver that comes with it.

Digital video editing is far more complicated than using word processing programs. You have to know the technical stuff. You are going nowhere if you don't even bother installing the cards by yourself.

Install the Capture Cards

Installing capture cards, as well as other boards, in your PC is really very easy. You may not even need a screwdriver! Once the card is installed, you will need to install the special driver that comes with it.

Digital video editing is far more complicated than using word processing programs. You have to know the technical stuff. You are going nowhere if you don't even bother installing the cards by yourself.