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What's the difference between a video card, a video capture card, and a video editing card?
All PCs have a video card, also called the graphics card. This is what your monitor plugs into.
Video capture and video editing cards are additional cards that fit into PCI slots. Video capture cards are the cheaper ones. They provide you with a socket for your camcorder.
Video editing cards have specialist hardware built into the cards. This hardware is dedicated to video editing tasks like rendering and MPEG encoding. The better video editing cards are real-time editing cards. Most people see these as very expensive. We see them as free. Yes, free... When you pay £500 for a good video editing card the chances are that in addition to the card, cables, manuals etc you are also getting a professional video editing software package that would normally cost £500-£600 on its own, like Adobe Premiere.
What type of video card do I need for video editing?
The video card has very little - if anything - to do with video editing. Whatever you're looking at on your monitor, whether it's a DVD movie, a game, an email, or a document, that picture is coming from the video card, and that's what the video card does i.e. sending signals to your monitor. Ideally you don't want the cheapest, most basic video card in a video editing PC. But you don't need the latest all singing and all dancing video card which is probably designed to appeal to gamers anyway.
What's the difference between DV, Firewire, IEEE1394, I-Link and DV-I?
DV stands for digital video. The plugs used to connect a DV camera to a PC are called DV, Firewire, or IEEE1394 plugs. They are all just different names for the same thing. I-Link is Sony's name for DV.
DV-I on the other hand is the interface for the monitor. It's the type of socket you get on video cards that allow you to plug in an LCD screen that supports a digital connection to the video card. It has nothing to do with video editing.
What is IEEE 1394b?
There is a new standard of Firewire called IEEE 1394b offering double the speeds of traditional firewire (up to 800 MB/sec). IEEE1394 plugs won't fit into a IEEE 1394b socket. Note also that most of the new IEEE 1394b cards are 64 bit cards and fit into server motherboards but don't fit into standard motherboards used in the average home PC and video editing PC.
How much of hard disk space do I need for video?
The storage requirements do depend on the format of the video, the quality (number of frames per second), and other factors, but the most important is how many minutes or hours of video you intend to store on your PC. Read our article on choosing hard disks for video editing. Uncompressed video (in AVI format) takes up around 100 GB per hour. Fortunately, compression into formats that lose very little of the original quality can save you a lot of space.
What is rendering? What is real-time editing?
When you apply an effect, a title or change you need to set it up in the video editing software and let the computer apply that change to every frame in your video clip. While setting up the effects/changes can take only a few seconds actually applying that effect to 86400 frames (roughly what you have in an hour's worth of video) can take hours if not days. A lot depends on the speed of your PC and whether you have a real-time video editing card. With a real-time video editing card it should usually take only about an hour to render a 60 minute clip.
Not all real time is the same. Some cards call themselves real-time cards but they may offer only real-time "preview" i.e. you can see how the effects appear in a small, low resolution version of your clip. If you do want to see the final version of the clip you still have to render it.
The good cards will offer most effects and a fairly large number of "streams" in real time mode. Some cards and software packages go even further and do the rendering in the background so that when you want to see what the final version of your clip looks like there is no rendering to be done and it's all ready for viewing.
Why do I need a video editing card when I can settle for a fast PC and good video editing software?
Good question. Today's fast PCs do make lighter work of video editing. Do remember though that video editing is the most demanding of any task you are likely to ask your PC to perform. It requires more power and speed than the latest and fastest games. Also VE cards come with a lot of very useful AND (otherwise) expensive software tools.
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