Help with MiniDV Firewire Card

I just purchased a Cannon ZR900 MiniDv Camcorder. I thought my PC had the IEEE 1394 Firewire card in it. It doesn't. I would like to download my videos onto the PC and then burn on DVD. My PC is a Dell XPS 400 Duo Core. Would this card work?

http://cgi.ebay.com/New-3-1-Port-FireWi ... dZViewItem

Ck this site for PC Equip: http://www.newegg.com They have fast shipping, I use them a lot. Search for 3+1 Ports Firewire 1394 PCI Host Controller, make sure you have the avail PCI slot.
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Assuming your Dell can fit any standard sized PCI any card should work, it's probably the single easiest piece of hardware to install.

Make sure when you transfer the video you transfer as DV-AVl, this is an exact bit for bit copy of what is on the tape.

For consumer editing or authoring I'd suggest either Ulead Movie Factory or Ulead Video Studio. If you look around e-bay and can find a copy of Video Studio 9 or higher for about $20 buy it. Movie Factory is only about $50 new. Both will take you from the cam to finished DVD however Video Studio editing (the video itself) purposes. Movie factory Excels for authoring (menus and DVD related stuff) DVD's.

And while you have it open, storage and memory are cheap. I your gonna be using a lot of video you want at least a couple gig of ram.

k9 Bara wrote:Ck this site for PC Equip: http://www.newegg.com They have fast shipping, I use them a lot. Search for 3+1 Ports Firewire 1394 PCI Host Controller, make sure you have the avail PCI slot.
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k9 Bara wrote:And while you have it open, storage and memory are cheap. I your gonna be using a lot of video you want at least a couple gig of ram.

Fully agree. Newegg is great and the more ram you have the better off you will be. I capture video via usb connection. Good luck

Thanks for all the help. I currently have 1 gig of ram. I think I'll add 1 more gig. I also have about 120 gig of free hard drive space so that should be ok. Plenty of space to add all these components. I have 4 extra PCI slots. 2 long and 2 short ports. If you guys have any other suggestions, feel free to add.

If you're using XP and don't have a lot of crap loaded 1 gig is plenty for DV for the average person, the bottleneck for video is the CPU followed by the HDD if you only have one. Extra ram never hurts though.

If you have two HDD's set the non OS drive aside for capture and/or storage. Set all your working folders in the software to the OS drive. This way if you're encoding a video you can read from the second drive and write to the OS drive. Whether that will have much effect on performance "depends" because again the biggest bottle neck is CPU. As I mentioned in the other thread I store all my video on external drives for easy access and take the tapes to a relatives house.

If you guys have any other suggestions, feel free to add.

Get a Matrox system they start around $20,000.

Mr. Mayor wrote:

If you have two HDD's set the non OS drive aside for capture and/or storage. Set all your working folders in the software to the OS drive. This way if you're encoding a video you can read from the second drive and write to the OS drive. Whether that will have much effect on performance "depends" because again the biggest bottle neck is CPU.


You really lost me there man.

Richard S. wrote:Get a Matrox system they start around $20,000.

$20,000!! I'm just a government employee. I wouldn't even know how to turn that thig on!

LOL. Mayor is correct. The windows "OS" drive could be repaired/replaced without issue to your video's saved. I have recommended that many times, especially with a windoz machine.
I know you have some storage space now, but video takes it from you fast. About an hour of video to a gig by average, depending on quality. But depending on your board, you may be limited. There are several ways to add the storage, 250 or so to start........

sterling_40man wrote:You really lost me there man.

This will be one of those moments... maybe.

0 = a hard drive
- = the path the data follows.
C = your cpu

Your hard dive can only read or write X amount of data in given length of time and the bandwidth of video is very high..

If we only have one hard drive it first has to read the data, process it the n write it back to the drive. (note the = is represents 2 minus signs)

O=C

If you have two hard drives you can read from one drive, process the video and write to the other drive

O-C-O

In other words we don't have a bottleneck during the read/write portion of our processing.

sterling_40man wrote:$20,000!! I'm just a government employee. I wouldn't even know how to turn that thig on

Real time editing costs money. As I mentioned it's the CPU that is usually the bottleneck. If you add a whole bunch of filters effects etc... 1 hour of video can takes hours to process. That machine utilizes hardware to do it real time.

Gotcha, Mr. Mayor! After I read your last post, one of my co-workers explained it to me a little bit more. Now I'm getting it!! I'll be adding 1 more gig of ram to my system. This should help out a lot. Thanks a bunch guys.