Videoguys' Great under $1000 PCI video capture card round up IILast year I wrote a round up article of all the under $1000 capture cards on the market at the time. I can’t believe how much things have changed. Of all the cards reviewed, only the Fast AV Master is still in production. The Bravado 1000, DC20, DC30, Q-Motion PCI, and FPS60 have all been discontinued. Fortunately a whole bunch of new and even better cards have been introduced. |
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Before I begin the round-up, I want to give you an overall picture of the performance, reliability and ease of install of the current crop of cards and software. The current cards perform fantastic. Any of the cards listed in this article are a good investment. The hardware itself on the cards is extremely reliable. A working card rarely stops working without some kind of outside event. The most common way cards do get knocked out is by power surges. If you are going to invest in a non linear editing system, spend the extra $25 bucks and invest in a surge protector.
I’m sure by now you have heard of, read about or experienced first hand a video capture card fiasco. Unfortunately things like IRQ conflicts, hardware compatibility and software crashes really do happen to good people. Even experts can run into systems so poorly configured that the only solution is to start from scratch. And by scratch I mean taking out all the new hardware, reformatting the system drive and reinstalling Win95. Thankfully things like this are the exception not the rule. Today’s cards have much smarter install programs and drivers that are more stable, making it easier then ever to get your system going.
Note: You can find some excellent DTV tech tips and troubleshooting pointers in the Tech Support section of The Desk Top Video Handbook On Line.
Let the round up begin!!!
I have broken the roundup into 4 groups. I have done this to make comparisons easier and to give you some kind of logical method of choosing a card. Here is the list of all the groups of the cards reviewed.Under $400 wonders
Matrox Rainbow Runner (street price $219.95)
To use the Rainbow Runner you must have either a Matrox 3D graphics card (Mystique or Millennium II) installed in your PC. If you do, for around $200 the Rainbow Runner is a great buy (if you don’t have a Matrox 3D board, you can get one for under $150). The video quality and features of this card are amazing. With my SCSI drive I was able to capture full screen video (714x480) at full motion with practically no dropped frames. The video quality was lower then the prosumer cards reviewed later, but at less then 1/3 the price I was amazed. Rainbow Runner comes with Ulead Media Studio Pro video editing software. By the time this article appears Rainbow Runner should be shipping with MS Pro 5.0 VE and have several special presets and custom modifications to speed rendering and provide additional features not found on other cards. Rainbow Runner is also a scan converter that lets you output whatever is on your computer screen to video. This is great for presentations or playing your favorite new 3D game on your home theater system It also ships with VDOphone teleconferencing software.
miro DRX
(street price $299.95)
The miro DRX is the first card bundled with MGI Videowave software. This is by far the easiest to use software package I have ever seen. If your are looking to get started in DTV, this is the card for you. DRX uses ½ screen capture (320x480) at full motion to give you very good, better then VHS quality output. Although the capture is ½ screen, the output is full screen, full motion. By capturing half screen DRX is capable of giving you very good video quality without the need for SCSI hard drives. I had no problem at all capturing to my EIDE drive. The results were very good with no dropped frames. I have run some tests comparing full screen 640x480 video at hi compression vs ½ screen video at much lower compression. At the same data rate (2.5 megs per second), I feel that ½ screen delivers better quality output then full screen. Why? Because the loss associated with higher compression is greater then the lower image quality from ½ screen. Working with ½ screen video is also much easier and faster. Because you only digitize half the information, rendering is much faster and the video files are ½ the size as well.
Note: Because the DRX uses half screen capture, I don’t recommend it if you are going to use it for still image grabbing as well. Still images looked distorted when imported into the editing software and output as part of the finished video.
LA Vision Snazzi
(street price $399.95)
Unlike the other two under $400 wonders, Snazzi is an MPEG based card. The advantage of MPEG is that you can compress the video much smaller while maintaining video quality. The output quality of the Snazzi is VHS/8mm. Not as hi quality as some of the other cards found in the survey, but more then adequate for creating excellent home videos. But video output quality isn’t what Snazzi is really about, multimedia digital video is. You can create video for presentations, web, CD-ROM, video email, screensavers, you name it. Just about anything you can imagine using digital video for. Snazzi is also capable of grabbing photo-quality images up to 1600 pixels by 1200 lines. Snazzi comes with everyhting you need to create outrageous digital video clips. The software package that includes MetaCreations Kai's Power Goo and Gryphon Morph, Adobe PhotoDeluxe to enhance/edit images, Ulead MediaStudio 2.5 & Cinax iFilmEdit Video Editors, InterActual Screen Saver creator, Stefra Video Control to send photo or video e-mail, VDO Phone for Video conferencing, Astound Studio M presentation software & CeQuadrat WinOnCD for creating video CD's. The graphical interface that comes with Snazzi is called Amigo control panel . It is very cool, super easy to use, and by far the most simple video capture and playback interface I have ever used.
By the time this article comes out LA Vision will be shipping Dazzle. This under $300 external video capture box hooks into your parallel port and allows you to capture and edit MPEG video without installing any boards. Because the video is compressed using MPEG, 1 hour of video takes up only 500 megs. With Dazzle you can capture and edit video using only a small portion of your existing hard drive or better yet a Zip/Jaz drive!! Dazzle will ship with much of the same software bundle as the Snazzi. I will do a complete hands on review of the Dazzle as soon as I get a production sample.
Home, hobby, multimedia production
miroDC20plus
(street price $599.95)
The DC20plus is a total hardware revision of the old DC20. It is actually much more like the old DC30, without the audio on board. The video quality of the DC20 is great, full screen (640x480), full motion video. PCI bus mastering provides excellent audio sync and gives the DC20 the ability to capture video at 4 megs per second. I consider 3.5 megs/sec or higher to be SVHS quality video. The video output quality of the DC20plus was superb. So is the software bundle. You get Ulead Media Studio5.0 VE for video editing, Ulead MPEG converter for creating multimedia content, ViVo producer 1.0 for streaming video on the web and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge for sophisticated audio editing. If you already have a top notch audio card, then DC20plus is a smart buy because you are not paying extra for a second audio card. At under $600 the DC20plus is my recommendation for home users and multimedia professionals who want excellent VHS/Hi8 quality output plus the ability to create video for Internet, CD-ROM and multimedia.
Data Translation Broadway
(street price $899.95)
If what you want is to create the best possible multimedia video, Broadway is the solution for you. You can capture either regular or SVHS video directly into MPRG format, or you can capture it as an avi file, edit it and then render it out as an MPEG file. The latter step is called two pass MPEG creation. In the past you had to invest thousands of dollars in hardware or wait endless hours for a software converter to turn out the final MPEG file. Software is fine for converter a few files every once in a while, but for serious multimedia creation, forget it. Broadway takes 3-5 minutes to convert 1 minute of avi video into MPEG. But that’s not all, Broadway has other great features. You can convert any avi into MPEG, even files not captured using Broadway. You can play your MPEG files out to tape, so you can hand over a copy of your work to your client. You get a 2 stream server and software for creating and streaming VDO live video clips over the web. You get drivers for both Win95 and NT in the box. If you want to create video for multimedia, or to add to presentation packages like PowerPoint, or to just have tons of fun, at around $900, Broadway is a great choice.
Data Translations has just released a low cost version of Broadway called the Broadway Beginner. At under $500 it is a very nice little card and perfect for those who need to create digital video on a tight budget for multimedia or home VHS output. It is the same hardware as the 2.5 version, with software and drivers aimed at the novice digital videomaker. Beginner is streamlined for quick set up and to get the end user editing and producing video as quickly as possible. It gives you a choice of only two preset quality levels and a much easier, less complicated interface. You use the two pass method to capture, edit then create your finished MPEG videos. Best of all, because Beginner uses the 2.5 hardware it can be upgraded to the full 2.5 version with software only. If you decide you want all the power and features of the 2.5 version you can get the upgrade directly from Data Translation for under $500.
Prosumer SVHS Quality output
Fast AV Master
(street price $849.95)
The granddaddy of the capture cards reviewed in this article and the only board still in production from last years round-up. The fact that the AV Master still holds its own can be attributed to 4 factors.
1) The hardware does the job. The AV Master was the first card with PCI bus mastering and audio on board. A year later it is still a cutting edge product capable of capturing and playing back top notch SVHS/Hi8 quality audio. I get over 4 megs per second (4:1 compression) with no frames dropped and perfect playback and audio sync.
2) Stable, constantly improving drivers. The AV Master drivers have been constantly refined and improved. That is why the AV Master is the only card capable of working on older Pent90 class machines all the way up to a screaming Pentium II running NT. Because the drivers have been fine tuned over the year, the AV Master is most widely compatible card reviewed.
3) AV Master comes with it’s own capture and playback utility called Fast Cap. I love Fast Cap. It is by far the best video capture interface I have ever used. Not only is it great for capturing video, but it has the ability to play back multiple AVI files seamlessly, thereby getting around the file size limitations of Windows.
4) AV Master is now bundled with the Full version of Ulead Media Studio Pro 5.0 software. MS Pro 5.0 is a major jump ahead in video editing technology. Smart Render speeds rendering dramatically by only rendering the portions of the video timeline that have transitions, filters or effects. As you edit and adjust your timeline, Smart Render only renders those segments that have changed, remembering all the previous preview renders. This makes the actual editing process much faster and easier. You can even play your video directly from the timeline using Smart Render. MS Pro 5.0 also comes with two very cool modules, a top notch 3D character generator and a Video Paint utility that lets you actually paint on and manipulate the moving video image.
The DC30plus ships with the full version of Adobe Premiere and automatically installs several presets optimized for the best possible video quality. DC30plus isn’t just optimized for Premiere, it comes with a very special Plug-In that puts it into a class with cards costing thousands more!! Miro INSTANT video allows you to play up to 1 hour of video directly from the Premiere timeline. This makes the DC30plus the first video capture card suitable for long form video. Best of all, miroINSTANT video utilizes the hardware of the DC30plus to make rendering in Premiere faster then with any other capture card in the survey. Simply put, the DC30plus is the best Premiere based video capture card bundle I have ever used. miroINSTANT video is amazing and the video quality of the DC30 plus is superb. If you are looking to make professional quality, long playing videos (over 10 minutes) DC30plus is my top recommendation.
Now that you know what cards are available, you probably are wondering what kind of a computer you need to put it in. Here are my top recommendations for a Windows based desk top video editing system. All of the cards in this article will work fine in a P133 or faster system. In fact the system I use to test these cards was a Micron P133 home with an Adaptec 2940UW controller and a 9.1 gig SCSI UltraWide Barracuda for storing video.
If you find any problems on this site please send mail to:
videoguy@videoguys.commiro DC30plus (street price $949.95)
The DC30 plus is the new under $1000 performance king. With my set up I get almost 6 megs per second throughput for video compression under 3:1. DC30plus is also capable of 704x480 screen size for more professional results and better rendering with hi end 3D animation programs. At that level the video quality of the DC30plus rivals professional cards costing twice as much.
miro DV100 (street price $599.95, DV1394 street price $1394)
The miro DV100 FireWire capture card lets you capture digital video directly to your hard drive. It requires the DC30 or DC30plus card to output the video back to tape. The DV100 does not have the ability to output digital video back to your DV cam via the FireWire cable. Pinnacle Systems calls the combination bundle of the DV100 and DC30plus the DV1394 bundle. The DV1394 lets you input video both via FireWire and analog inputs. The finished video can then be output to video tape or converted into any number of multimedia formats. What makes the DV100 and DV1394 bundle special is a very powerful software utility called StoryTools. StoryTools takes full advantage of the frame accurate edit control possible via FireWire. You can log your scenes and build your EDL directly from the DV source, without having to digitize any footage. Once you have created your EDL, StoryTools goes back and captures only the video clips you are going to use. Not a meg of disk space is wasted by capturing bad footage. The incredible editing power and productivity of StoryTools makes the DV1394 a very good choice for home videographers with DV cams. I also like the fact that you can use your older analog footage and your newer DV footage together in the same production.
DPS Spark (Street price $799.95 w/Video Action)
The DPS Spark is the only PC based DV input and output card available for under $1000. Spark lets you capture and playback DV video that is identical in quality to the original DV footage. I did a complete hands on review of the Spark a few issues ago, so I want to go over what’s new. Spark is now available for Win NT, Win95 and PowerMac. The hardware is identical for each system (Adaptec 8940 FireWire PCI interface), only the software changes. Speaking of software, one of the big advantages of the Spark is that you can get it in a variety of software bundles. The Spark card is available ‘naked’ w/o any editing software for around $650. This is great for experience desk top video users who already have non linear editing software. You can also get the Spark with the full version of Adobe Premiere for around $900. But the most exciting bundle should just now be released. Earlier this year DPS purchased Star Media Systems, the maker of Video Action Pro software, a highly regarded hi end editing package for their Perception system. DPS has customized Video Action for the Spark. All the DV capture, editing and deck control are built into the software. Unfortunately I was not able to get my beta copy in time for this article, but my inside sources tell me the integration with the Spark hardware is excellent. More good Spark news. The first generation of hardware had problems with some Pentium Pro and Pentium II systems. These problems have been fixed with the new revision.
Conclusion
There you have it, the under $1000 video capture card Round Up 2. The cards keep getting better and better. At the time I was writing this article I learned about several new video capture cards that should be starting to ship by the time you read this. I hope to be reviewing these new cards from DPS, Truevision, Quadrant, and Adaptec in future issues.
Home/Hobby video
Prosumer/Professional quality video
Pentium 200MMX processor
32 Megs EDO RAM
4 meg graphics card w/ direct draw overlay
3+ gig EIDE or Ultra EIDE drive for software and operating system
5+ gig Ultra EIDE or Ultra SCSI drive dedicated for video capture
Multimedia - Sound Card, CD ROM, Speakers
17 inch display
Pentium II 266+
64 megs EDO RAM
4+ meg graphics card w/ direct draw overlay
3+ gig EIDE or Ultra EIDE drive for software and operating system
9 gig Ultra Wide SCSI drive (Seagate Barracuda/Cheetah or Quantum Atlas II) for video
Adaptec 2940UW PCI SCSI Controller
SCSI Jazz or SyJet for backup and multimedia work
Multimedia - Sound Card, CD ROM, Speakers
21+ inch display
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