Cheap firewire card vs. expensive DV package

[TRILIGHT]

Hey! It's your friendly neighborhood TRILIGHT again! hehe ;) I have a new question that I'm having a hard time figuring out. (Bear in mind, I don't have a cable yet. Hope to get one soon.) If I am able to transfer video from the camera into the computer via my cheap $40 firewire card then what is the purpose behind some of these packages out there such as the Pinnacle Pro-One RTDV or Edition DV500? I mean, even the bundle without Adobe Premiere costs $999 for the Pro-One RTDV! Edition DV500 is $799! It's no different at other companies either. Matrox's offerings come in around $700-1000 as well!

Is it all about the software or something? I already have Premiere and a number of very good DVD authoring packages and MPEG encoders. What the hell would I really be getting for my $700-1000 anyway? Is there some "super special" feature I am missing when it comes to these packages? Is it just because they are charging a ton of money for software I already have or is there more to it than that? I know it can't be the $40 firewire card. ;)

[TRILIGHT]

Well, after doing a ton of reading (there is really not as much information about DV products on the Net as I would think there would be!) and spending some time reading all the boxes at the local retail stores, I have a bit more info. Seems the high-level packages I was looking at use proprietary chipsets and software to achieve certain realtime visual effects. I can't say I see it being worth $1000 since I am not running a video production facility. At this point, I think it's best just to stick with importing the video via the regular old firewire card and then doing whatever "effects" I may really want via software I already have like Adobe After Effects. For anyone interested, I got a lot of really useful information from this article...

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/12_dec/reviews/cw_dvshootout2003.htm

[ulfschack]

Plus some of these cards have analogue in as well, and some do RT mpeg-2 encoding. Hardware encodes can never be as good as soft (well they can, actually, but software can definately do better than the best hardware ... you know what I mean right :) )

So just say no. Personally I bought a generic 2 1/2 years ago for $50 figuring that IEEE1394 was IEEE1394 nomatter what card it sits on, whether pinnacle is the manufacturer or not ... and I was right :)

cheers

[TRILIGHT]

Well, I finally got a cable and transfer is just fine through the cheap-o firewire card I have. My biggest problem was that Premiere kept complaining everytime I tried to enter a name for the final save of the captured video. I never could get it to work. I think my Premiere installation might be screwed up though due to some Pinnacle drivers still being on there from a DC1000 card that is no longer in the system. Capturing using DVIO worked fine and I was able to import it to Premiere to work on it.

As for the analog in, I wouldn't have to worry about that. The Sony allows for digital pass through so you can capture from an analog source. I know what you mean about the RT MPEG encoding. It's convenient but never quite as good as software. I still think I might get a Matrox RT.100 set eventually. It has received really high marks and the realtime video effects would be nice. For now, the cheap $40 firewire card is transferring video just fine so that's what I'm sticking with. :) Thanks for all the help/info ulfschack!