Video Editing - Hardware Vs. Software

[bill2]

Dear All.

I would appreciate if someone would explain to me what is the REAL difference between Hardware video capture & editing and Software editing (e.g. Premire, VS, MSP).

Since Hardware cost between 1000 to 2000 USD I assume there is a big differences, far beyond just a speed issues.

1. Is there a difference in quality terms?
2. Is there a Difference in features (abilities) term?
3. Does the speed issue truly worth it?
4. Any othere differences I couldn't think of?

Thanks in advance

[Sciascia]

Long, long, long ago, about 2-3 years ago, HW capture was the way to go. CPU speeds were not fast enough to capture high quality video and companies came up with HW to offload the CPU and perform compression on a seperate card. This was great, because all of the compression and decompression was done by the card. Everyone was happy. Then the industry had the audacity t go and make faster CPUs and HDs and now they are more than fast enough to deliver high quality captures, sometimes higher quality than HW captures. Now this is contingent on how your system is configured as well, if you have applications running in the background than you will run into problems (dropped frames, stuttering playback). But with a fairly clean install, and a defragged HD, a decent amount of RAM and a good disc system you can capture SW compression very easily. The attractive part of SW compression is that instead of installing new HW, you can just install some new SW. So the scalabilty is better from that standpoint. Another plus is that you can view the video on other computers if they have the codec installed. If you use HW then it will only read back on that PC in most cases, (yes I know about PicVideo and Morgan). Some are proprietary formats though, like AVID.

With a newer system there is no real advantage of having HW compression. If you are like me it just makes you feel a little better to have it. If I could find a card that delivered DVDMax as well as a tuner, my G400 would be gone. I just can't find a suitable replacement. 16M is just not enouigh to play games today

[Hulk]

I agree with the above post.

Firewire capture of dv footage has pretty modest bandwidth requirements and even huffyuv captures are doable on most any PC built within the last year or two. Assuming is has decent components, and a defragged dedicated capture drive. For the most part, the capture part of the video editing equation has been solved by today's fast hard drives and processors.

Now we're working on the actual editing, nudging that closer and closer to real time...