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The Video Capture Card is undoubtedly the most important component that a system has. It's easy to spend a lot of money on a capture card if you want to. Depending on what you want to do you can buy something that will let you create Titanic on your desktop for a few thousand dollars. Often its these multi-thousand dollar cards that people think of when they think digital vidding. Additionally, the video print media doesn't help much as they cater to the high end and tend to spend their time review the more deluxe versions. But I'm here to tell you that you can get a quality video capture card for less than $200.00.

There are several products on the market right now in this price range. I have used a couple of them and read reviews of the other. After that I talk about some of the more expensive products.

In judging capture cards there are several factors that are important. First, acceptable frame capture speed must be no less than 30 frames per second (fps) which is essentially what video is broadcast on television at, and what NTSC video recorders record at. Second, the pixel rate that can be recorded at that speed is important. Broadcast quality is no less than 640x480 (monitor size) or 704x480 (TV Size). Finally there is the category of fields per second which can be as high as 60. A top quality card will do 640x480 at 30fps at 60 fields per second. This card will produce betacam quality production which is equivalent to video nirvana.

On the other hand for vidding we do not need betacam quality, that's overkill. For our purposes we can make do with 320x240 (half screen size) at 30fps at 60 fields per second as long as the system will display it at 640x480 or 704x480 at VHS or S-VHS quality. What's the difference you ask? The real difference is how many megabytes per second the capture card can take. To get 640x480 30/60 a capture card has to be able to capture 7 megs per second (or course your disk drive has to be able to write at that speed too). On the other hand at 320x240 for S-VHS quality the card need only capture 3 megabytes a second. That's a cheaper card to make and to sell and that's what we're interested in.

The Intel Smart Video Recorder III is the first video capture card that I used. It captures 320x240 30/60. Some of you may have seen the vid that was done with that at Escapade in Feb, 1998. The quality of the picture was better than some vids I've seen but it was not great, not even good. The essential problem was that the ISVR III has no output jack, it is truly only a capture card and it captures only at half screen. To output to full screen I had to compress the video in a format that would expand (technical term is intercalate) to 640x480 and then output it through the tv port of my video card. I chose MPEG-1. It was not a bad format, (though I had to buy a special compression program) but it was clearly not as good as it should have been. Because of the way MPEG-1 works, it the background had a sort of jittery quality, movements were not completely smooth and occasionally in moments of high action there was pixellation. Its a fine card for screen captures and web videos, but not for vidding. It comes with Asymetrix Digital Video Producer which I will review on the software page. The whole thing was $200.

This is the card that I am currently using and I am completely in love with it. It will capture 3mb at 320x240 30/60, however it has its own output port which will display the picture at 720x480 at S-VHS quality. Movement is great, and the vids look as good as or better than the majority of VHS produced vids. The DRX card uses a hardware M-JPEG codec so it can produce quality vids. The best thing is that it cost only $179.00 at Direct Video. It comes with MGI VideoWave, which I will describe below, but suffice it to say that you should probably plan to buy another video editing program.

MATROX RAINBOW RUNNER STUDIO (aka VIDEO GRAPHICS AND TV KIT)

This product was recently reviewed in Camcorder & ComputerVideo (June 1998). See also the review from the Electronic Mailbox. This product is a little pricier than the others I have just reviewed at about $350.00 However, it does come with its own Video Card so if you have to upgrade your video card anyway, it may not be that expensive. But it does do full motion video (704x480) at 30/60 well.at a max of about 3mb/s (same as the DRX). This product comes with Ulead's Media Studio Pro 5.0 VE a high powered video editing software package. In fact, in terms of software, this package comes with the best in its price bracket. While Camcorder & ComputerVideo complain about the speed of the software, they recommend it as a great entry level product.

This is Miro's next step up after the DRX (the DRX used to be the DC10). It cost $549. It will capture 640x480 at 30/60 with a max transfer rate of 4mb/s. It comes with Ulead Media Studio Pro 5.0 VE, Vivo Active Producer and Sound Forge. Its a fine system but if I were going to spend $550, I spend $250 more and get the next one.

The DC30 Plus is an extraordinarily popular card. It does 704x480 at 30/60 and has capture rates of 7mb/s (now you will need fastrack). Unlike the other cards it captures sound on the card itself rather than using your own sound card. Also it comes with the full version of Adobe Premiere, the standard in video editing software (see review in software section). It circumvents the rendering process with a neat feature called miroInstant Video which allows you to output your vid directly to tape. If I had money to blow, I'd buy this card. alas.