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I second everything that Brian has said. I own a RTX.100, and it's a great realtime card -- certainly the best realtime card on the market. But . . .
IMO, realtime cards are now more trouble than they're worth for DV editing -- and I say that as someone who's owned a Canopus DV Storm, a Matrox RT2500 and a RTX.100 over the last few years. Realtime cards get you true realtime DV out, and the RTX.100 (but not the RTX.10, IIRC) offers a terrific realtime color corrector that ALMOST justifies the purchase by itself. But using a realtime card also locks you into using Premiere, and worse, it can significantly increase your chance of running into stability problems, even on systems with 100% vendor-approved components. In my experience, even the most stable realtime solutions (used to be the Storm, now is the RTX.100) are significantly more flakey than any of the main software packages available today. Whether that's Adobe's fault or the board makers' is a question for another day . . .
So get yourself a Pyro firewire card and a Canopus ADVC-100. Plug the ADVC into the Pyro, and voila! -- you've got analog and digital I/O that looks as good as the output from any of the realtime cards. What's better, you can use it with any editor that strikes your fancy, and all of them today can use the analog out of the ADVC to give you at least some degree of realtime preview on a TV. If you want to capture an analog stream, simply select the ADVC as your signal source -- the ADVC will convert the analog signal into a DV stream that the Pyro can capture without problems.
As for the pros and cons of a capture card v. a D/A converter like the ADVC: I would definitely go for a converter. Consumer capture cards tend to use codecs that can be problematic for capture (dropped frames) or editing (a lot of them use MPEG-2 for capture, which is problematic to edit). On a modern computer, dropped frames simply aren't an issue when capturing DV over firewire, and just about all the software today is optimized for DV editing. It's a DV world right now -- embrace it.
Finally, if you do decide to go the converter route, I really recommend getting the Canopus unit rather than something like the Dazzle Hollywood DV bridge. The Canopus costs more, but it's worth it: it works with seemingly everything, without issues. I have yet to hear anyone complain about it.
IMO, realtime cards are now more trouble than they're worth for DV editing -- and I say that as someone who's owned a Canopus DV Storm, a Matrox RT2500 and a RTX.100 over the last few years. Realtime cards get you true realtime DV out, and the RTX.100 (but not the RTX.10, IIRC) offers a terrific realtime color corrector that ALMOST justifies the purchase by itself. But using a realtime card also locks you into using Premiere, and worse, it can significantly increase your chance of running into stability problems, even on systems with 100% vendor-approved components. In my experience, even the most stable realtime solutions (used to be the Storm, now is the RTX.100) are significantly more flakey than any of the main software packages available today. Whether that's Adobe's fault or the board makers' is a question for another day . . .
So get yourself a Pyro firewire card and a Canopus ADVC-100. Plug the ADVC into the Pyro, and voila! -- you've got analog and digital I/O that looks as good as the output from any of the realtime cards. What's better, you can use it with any editor that strikes your fancy, and all of them today can use the analog out of the ADVC to give you at least some degree of realtime preview on a TV. If you want to capture an analog stream, simply select the ADVC as your signal source -- the ADVC will convert the analog signal into a DV stream that the Pyro can capture without problems.
As for the pros and cons of a capture card v. a D/A converter like the ADVC: I would definitely go for a converter. Consumer capture cards tend to use codecs that can be problematic for capture (dropped frames) or editing (a lot of them use MPEG-2 for capture, which is problematic to edit). On a modern computer, dropped frames simply aren't an issue when capturing DV over firewire, and just about all the software today is optimized for DV editing. It's a DV world right now -- embrace it.
Finally, if you do decide to go the converter route, I really recommend getting the Canopus unit rather than something like the Dazzle Hollywood DV bridge. The Canopus costs more, but it's worth it: it works with seemingly everything, without issues. I have yet to hear anyone complain about it.
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