Choosing the Best
Video Firewire Card
you need to keep in mind before you buy one.
A computer is today used to do a lot of enhancements and processing of digital data which is captured from different digital and electronic devices. To be able to do that, you need some mechanism to capture the digital data stored in those external devices into your computer.
Why Use Firewire?
There are many ways in which you can transfer digital data from an external device into your computer.
Using cables, you can easily connect digital devices to ports (slots) available on computers. Transferring through USB and Firewire ports are two such methods of transferring digital data!
Here we are going to look at Firewire. The primary reason for that is because it gives transfer speeds that are extremely high as compared to transfer through USB.
Because of the high transmission speeds available on a Firewire card, there is no loss in quality and the time taken is much less. You just need a firewire cable to connect your camcorder's DV output to your computer's firewire port, and you are ready to capture video on your computer.
FireWire technology is easy to use and affordable; it puts professional movie-making capability within the reach of the home video user.
Camcorder manuals, in general, do not devote a lot of pages to make you understand about firewire.
So if you don't already have a firewire video card on your computer, and intend to buy one, here are some factors that you need to consider.
Drivers - OHCI or Proprietary?
To be able to capture video through firewire, drivers (software) need to be installed on your computer. By default drivers (aka native drivers) for Firewire are already included in Windows and Mac operating systems.
Firewire cards which are built to use these default drivers are said to be OHCI (Open Host Controller Interface) compatible. This means that you can plug-and-play the firewire card on your computer and start transferring data. These cards are usually cheaper and are suitable more to the average home user.
On the other hand, you also get video firewire cards, for which the manufacturer provides their own software drivers. These firewire cards tend to be more expensive since they are efficient, faster and allow features like applying real-time effects.
Free Bundled Software
Since firewire cards are mostly used to capture video, many firewire cards come with bundled video editing software.
Yes, it is true! Some of them do give away video editing software, but it will not be a high end editing software. It will mostly be a lighter version of some popular software.
If you are a beginner in this area, always be on the look out for such deals. It will save you some money. For professional use, you will have to go for full a complete version of some popular video editing software.
Need to Use Real-Time Effects?
Firewire cards in the higher price range have the capability to process transitions and effects, speeding up the rendering process.
Rendering is the process of compiling all the transitions, video effects, filters, layers, titles & captions that you have applied to your video, to produce a final version.
All of you who have already been into video editing would know that rendering a video takes a long time and can be frustrating, especially if you have a slow computer and firewire video cards.
A high-end firewire card speeds up the rendering process by doing most of the processing of transitions ∓ effects on the card itself. You need to bear in mind that such firewire cards do come at a premium.
Recommended Firewire Cards
Let us take a look at the popular brands of firewire pci cards available in the market, which I personally recommend as well.
Retails for less than $35 online. The company offers you this card featuring transfer data at 400Mbps for real time video capture and professional sound and graphics editing.
Includes both Pinnacle Studio (integrated with Video CD and DVD creation features) and PCI analog and digital video capture card for less than 100$.
From ADS Technologies, this PCI firewire card is value for money. With one card, you add two FireWire ports and three USB 2.0 ports, so you can easily connect to hard drives, DVD burners, DV camcorders, and video capture devices.
Conclusion
If you already intend to upgrade your computer with features like more RAM and so on, it would make sense to go in for a firewire card as well. It is a must for capturing videos. While buying, consider factors like OHCI-compliant and availability of real-time effects. Pinnacle Studio 9 AV/DV offers you video editing software bundled with a firewire card; you can make use of it. For home users, the Buslink 3 Port Firewire PCI Card would also suffice.
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