Which Video Card?

[Labrat]

I am putting together a system for a friend who has a DV camcorder. He wants to capture video from the DV camcorder, edit it, and burn to SVCD or some other MPEG-2 format for archiving. The system will be a P4 1.6GHz with 256DDR RAM. He already has a firewire card. I need a suggestion for a video card that can rendor good quality video. Or does it even matter which video card if he already has a DV camcorder? What is required to capture the Digital Video and convert to MPEG-2. Sorry, I am kind of new to this!

[wkulecz]

The Matrox G450 is nice if games aren't important. If the DVDmax feature is enabled you can make tapes from MPEG and most AVI file types, although ouptutting DV thru the camcorder makes the best tapes, once you've "archived" as mpeg2 you've lost this capability unless you also save the ~13GB/hr DV.

I'm seeing GeForce2 cards with TV out for under $100 (G450 OEM is ~$60) but I don't know if they have anything like the DVDmax feature.

I'd stay away from the newest cards since it usually takes several updates to get the drivers right -- who needs one more source of potential problems if video editing is the main goal.

--wally.

[Labrat]

Thanks. Games are definitely not important, only video, as he already has Playstation 2, GameCube, etc. etc. I am shying away from Matrox cards at the moment because of the lack of driver support for WinXP, which will be the OS installed.

[wkulecz]

I'm staying away from XP because of WPA which is a nightmare for all the hardware swapping and testing I do.

I'm also boycotting Matrox for capture cards because of the lack of drivers issue, but for 2D image quality they still can't be beat IMHO.

But I thought the latest G450 drivers supported XP.
Says so in the readme. For W2K these are WHQL certified and have given me no trouble.

The only thing I don't like is the DVDmax options are more mouse clicks away which is a PITA since the best settings for DV and MPEG2 give crap output for MPEG1 and vice-versa.

--wally.