advice about YUV capture card?

[jkwarras]

Hi,

I know NLE editing uncompressed is out of budget of many people (as me), so i'm looking the best way to edit a digital film without spending all my bones on that :rolleyes:

I own a MatroxRT2000 which can capture Composite and DV and works in DV (realtime) and/or MPEG2. But it doesn't handle higher digital formats, i'm thinking DigiBeta for ex. Sure, you can connnect a Digibeta in order to capture with this card, but as is composite, you lose too much information. Even if I can afford to rent a DigiBeta, I can't afford the rental of post-processing NLE systems and/or professional editing systems.

So i'm lookin the way to capture it without losing signal (YUV) and edit it in losless format (huffyuv maybe) and than send it back to the original format (DigiBeta). Many captures card are on the market but they're too expensives. For ex. I know that Matrox DigiSuite can do what i want, and also some Pinaccles cards,i really don't know the rest.

But maybe someone knows the best method to do that without expending all my earnings. Cheap capture cards that do this exists? :p Any suggestion/advices are more than welcome. Thanls in advance.

Regards

[Amit]

@jkwarras

I am not sure whether what I am suggesting will work for you since I don't have either the equipment or the software to try. But here's some information that might do the trick.

I think any OHCI IEEE1394 board will let you caputre the video into the DVCPro file format. Now that you have th digital file on your PC, you can use Premiere to do you edits and then before you export, download the Mainconcept DVC 25/50 Codec to export your timeline in DVCPro format. It support YUV 4:1:1 and 4:2:2 colorspace. Check the mainconcept web site for details. The codec is not that expensive and you can probably get an OHCI IEE1394 card in the market for $60.

This is the cheeapest solution that I think might work for you.

I also have a question for you. I only work with DV using Premiere 6.5, Can you tell me how can I use Huffy for my work?

Thanks & Good Luck
-Amit

[jkwarras]

Thanks for your reply,

What you say will work, but there's no reason to do that: you capture via firewire into DV (25Mbps, the standard) and then you edit and export to a higher format DVPro (50 Mbps). It will no improve quality because the format is already in a lower format. What i'm looking is a way to capture for ex. Digital Betacam the cheapest way, but i think isn't possible with a firewire and capturecards that handle that are quite expensive (around 3000 Euros).

Your question: To capture into Huffyuv just capture via Media Player Classic (open Device) and choose you DVCam. Than you can choose the format you want. Sound will not be captured, you have to plug your cam into the soundcard. If what you want is to convert after the edit, just capture DV normally and then use premiere. You can use huffyuv to edit as AVI mode (not the DV AVI).

Regards