My fucking capture card sucks cock -- recommend a new one

Sorry for the swearing, but I'm sick of tinkering with this shit. I get really fucked off when hardware dies...even if it is 3 years old. This shit should last 5 at least. Anyways...

I'm giving up on my Digital/Analog capture card. It was good, but now it's dead and apparently only 8 other people in the world use it and post in the support forum, so I'm sick of screwing around with it with it. The Digital part actually works... now I just need to use my DV camera.

Anyways, requirements:
-Must work with Premiere. If it doesn't that means it works w/ some proprietary or lame piece of shit. Premiere ain't all hams and plaque, but I know how to use it, and it supports the formats I want
-Analogue capture is what I need, but both analogue & digital would be nice so I don't have too much crap hanging out of my machine.
-Up to S-Video input. No need for VGA
-I don't mind spending $$ for a good product. That probably means I won't be able to buy it at CompUSA

Later.. I'm going to sleep.

 

Any analogue card using the Connexant cx23881 or Philips chips are pretty decent, though it won't usually say on the box. The basic Hauppage WinTV PCI ones are good - I wouldn't bother with any of the fancy ones with hardware MPEG2 encoding or whatever - they're just a waste of time and money. They're pretty cheap too - my one (WinTV PCI-FM - US models are a bit different) is only 50 Euro, and it's got a stereo tuner and s-video/comp. in.

I don't know what you're talking about using Premiere for analogue capturing though - I didn't even know that's possible. VirtualVCR seems to be the way to go - it's a program for capturing video - plain and simple. And it's free. I've never had any problems using it, and I get great results. Here's a great guide on analogue capturing. Also check out the forums on Doom9 as well if you need help.

What do you mean by digital capturing? If you're talking about through FireWire, just get any old FireWire card - a non-crap one would set you back about $20-30.

 

Buffalo cards are pretty decent and should be fine with Premiere. Just don't buy the old one like mine that runs only under Win 9X, 2000. The high end ones even have their own CPU so that your PC'S CPU is left to do what ever it wants. This is how mine is. Sadly my one only uses the CPU for MPEG 2 encoding while AVI encoding must go through the PC's CPU.

Yakumo

 

I shouldn't worry about the ones with hardware encoding on them, so long as you've got a reasonably powerful CPU you should be fine without it. In terms of support try and get a well known brand name, not some dodgy knock-off taiwanese no-name card.

I've not heard of Premiere doing analogue vid capture. I've only ever used it for digital via firewire. My Audigy 2's external box has a firewire port on it, I'm pretty sure the models without an external box have them on the card itself as well, so just check your sound card doesn't have a spare firewire port before you go shelling out

 

Canopus make some nice products. They do breakout boxes that until recently ALSO needed a capture card, but now they have firewire, so you can just capture straight in.

There products range from something like £300 up to about £20,000 in the UK.

Pinnacle are OK, but I'm going off them slightly. Mine is virtually useless because they failed to write a model number on it, and their site is useless.

 

Well, Buffalo is a Japanese brand, so no chance I'll get that here.

Pinnacle is the brand I have now. It worked fine until I installed it in my new PC. The DV catpure works flawlessly... it just won't capture analogue. And yes, of course premiere captures analogue. Why wouldn't it? That's like saying Photoshop doesn't have TWAIN support.

Cannopus sounds like something I should look into. They're the only other name I know of. Guess I'll dig around a bit on the net to study up for my next paper weight.

 

I thought buffalo was sold everywhere?

 

Check this place out.

http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=VCD#VideoCaptureCards/TVCards

I'm sure you'll find a decent card. I'm kinda glad that I bought an ATI All In Wonder. Grant it the software it uses is proprietary whereas those cards use software that can be used on another card. I recommend you get either that $53 card or the $85 one.

 

I never saw Buffalo until I went to Japan, and never saw them since. If I'm not mistaken, most of their stuff is Logitech with the name changed (I could be wrong though).

 

Aha, is it a WDM card? Premiere doesn't support certain devices - so it COULD be premiere. Try using WinDVR.

 

Windows Digital Media?? Not sure but my ATI drivers use WDM.

 

It's not Premiere. I didn't come out and say it, but the DV portion works in Premiere. The Analogue portion did too until recently. In fact, Premiere has an HW lock on the driver, so you can ONLY capture with Premiere. I've reinstalled it a couple of times as well.

 

I didn't know Premiere does that - sounds annoying. Have you tried using VirtualVCR for analogue capturing? It seems to work with any capture device that uses WDM drivers - even my crappy "TwinkleCam" webcam that I got free with my broadband!

And what card do you have? Judging by its age, the analogue capture part is probably using one of the old Brooktree chips (Bt848/849/878/879), which seemed never officially got WDM drivers (or ones that worked properly if they did), which could explain its not-working-ness in your new PC (definately explaining it if your old PC used Win9x/ME).

If it does use one of those chips, try getting drivers from here: http://btwincap.sourceforge.net

 

i useing that for capute on MAC and PC
2 in 1 DV+VHS VCR

DV<->S-Video/AV

 

Hi_Ricky, you really do have a lot of good stuff. What do you do for a living ?

Yakumo

 

YOu have the coolest shit sometimes. You are probably into the A/V editing field or something.

 

With that much programming knowledge and gear? I'd say he's a programmer

It makes me laugh that his sig pic is some high end vid gear, and he shows us a crappy domestic DV converter!! hehe

 

hmm i ready sold all SONY DSR system. only keep DA-1,WV-700,VX2000 on hand now.
and i useing PowerMacG4/733 with FinalcutProHD to video edit.

 

I used to use Final Cut Pro & DV/SVHS unit (firewire) to capture too, I have to say I can't think of a better way to capture analog video (well besides some crazy RGB capture card which wouldn't be suitable for DV/(S)VHS anyway) My school's units looked very similar to Ricky's but were JVC I believe, still trying to find the exact model number cuz I wanna buy one. Obviously I used G4s too, don't know what software is available for PCs to capture from those 2-in-1 firewire players but it was way simple with Final Cut.

 

Since you said that your DV capture still works, might I recommend a unit similar to the ADSTech Pyro A/V Link. I have one of these, and it basically captures analog video (composite, S-Video, or component) and encodes it to DV, which it then transfers over a standard Firewire link. It works with any software that can capture from DV (including Premiere), and has a 4-pin Firewire port on the front which you should be able to chain your camera to. The quality is excellent, and on par with most other capture cards I've used. Since it's DV, it captures at a standard 720x480x29.97fps (or 720x576x25fps for PAL).

It also currently comes with Premiere Elements, but it sounds like you won't need that (when I bought mine, it came with some shit like Ulead VideoStudio 7 SE). Also, the later units purportedly do a better job with 'dirtier' sources like (S)VHS than my unit does (but since I capture from clean video sources, it doesn't affect me).