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It might be between 6k and 12k US$ with all the trimmings. High end pro video can get quite expensive to mere mortals. On the other hand, $12k for a video production company working on the high end is peanuts.

You probably already know what I'm talking about, Leo, but for the edification of others, take a look at this video capture card for only $2499!

It's quite possible that his company also purchased through a VAR, which can substantially increase the price up front, but can have many advantages down the line. The VAR might be bundling software, so the cost of the software might be reflected in the price range he gave. Have a look at this VAR turnkey system. I'm using Pro Max as an example, because I've been a customer in the past, and I think they're one of the better, if not the best, of the VARs in the pro video market and they've been doing it for a long time.

It might be between 6k and 12k US$ with all the trimmings. High end pro video can get quite expensive to mere mortals. On the other hand, $12k for a video production company working on the high end is peanuts.

You probably already know what I'm talking about, Leo, but for the edification of others, take a look at this video capture card for only $2499!

It's quite possible that his company also purchased through a VAR, which can substantially increase the price up front, but can have many advantages down the line. The VAR might be bundling software, so the cost of the software might be reflected in the price range he gave. Have a look at this VAR turnkey system. I'm using Pro Max as an example, because I've been a customer in the past, and I think they're one of the better, if not the best, of the VARs in the pro video market and they've been doing it for a long time.

It might be between 6k and 12k US$ with all the trimmings. High end pro video can get quite expensive to mere mortals. On the other hand, $12k for a video production company working on the high end is peanuts.

You probably already know what I'm talking about, Leo, but for the edification of others, take a look at this video capture card for only $2499!

It's quite possible that his company also purchased through a VAR, which can substantially increase the price up front, but can have many advantages down the line. The VAR might be bundling software, so the cost of the software might be reflected in the price range he gave. Have a look at this VAR turnkey system. I'm using Pro Max as an example, because I've been a customer in the past, and I think they're one of the better, if not the best, of the VARs in the pro video market and they've been doing it for a long time.

A $25.000 Mac with a CineWave-RT HD card running Final Cut Pro supports uncompressed HD. So does the $200.000 HD Avid similar to the one used to cut SW-EP2. A few other high end editing packages work in uncompressed HD. How else are you gonna do an online HD edit? You may use compressed while you're editing the offline (online=the final master made to conform the offline; offline=where you do the creative part of editing, so lower quality is ok), but you need uncompressed to finalize the master. There's even an uncompressed HD professional system which costs as much as a big house in a good area which does pretty much anything you want in realtime.
Check out ProMax for basic Final Cut Pro based systems that handle uncompressed HD. These systems use Medéa SCSI-3 RAID towers for the hard drive space, which can pump out the necessary 200+ mb/s needed for uncompressed HD (168mb/s for 24p).
I'm working on visual effects for a movie shot on 24p HD right now, and it's being done in uncompressed HD, so I know a tiny bit about this stuff.

There is no "better than connecting it to Video-In..."

Laserdiscs are, believe it or not, analog. (The video is, anyway, there were a few incarnations of digital audio.) Worse than that, they're composite video, so you need to decide whether the comb filter in your capture device is better than the one in your LD player. (Decide this by testing with a good monitor. Dot crawl sucks.)

I have a pretty sizeable collection of Laserdiscs, and keep meaning to start converting these to DVDR. I have this bizarre hangup that I need to move the AC3 audio, and I haven't found any way to capture AC3 with a S/PDIF card. (Pointers appreciated!)

The reality is that I should ignore that, since anything I might have with AC3/DTS is recent enough that it's likely to be rereleased anyway.

Back to your question, spend as much money as you can bear on the capture device, (I have a Director's Cut, but would get a DA-MAX if I were doing this for money.) think about a proc-amp (might not be necessary) and go for it.

You can easily add a second IDE drive (bracket and cable are built-in) and if you need to add more, Promax makes a card called Turbomax that gives you two more buses.

According to www.matroxusers.com ProMax are using the G400 chipset to make dualhead videocards for the Mac.

See here for more info.

I wonder if Aliaswavefront knows something we don't about the video for Mac situation. They are releasing Maya 3 for OSX early next year (and Linux too). Running Maya with an ATI Rage 128 or even a Radeon will seriously limit what it is capable of. I've seen Maya demoed on an Irix SGI and my brother-in-law is currently running Maya 3 on NT with a 3Dlabs Oxygen RPM video card. He is a huge Mac fan and the rest of his software is already on his G4. He wants to switch it over to his Mac and I'm his technical support so I have been looking into the options. I don't have a Mac of my own but have become more interested as time goes on. I guess I will need to renegotiate my salary before I buy a G4.

Okay, so it has a pricetag the average consumer might poop themselves over, but it's worth every penny. I produce medium length (5-20 minute) videos for local campus groups at my university, and I've found that if you've got the cash to shell out for the camera ($1000 and UP!) you can afford a system to go with hit. Primary examples would include ProMax Technologies setups complete for a beginner or some guy with a pro-based background. No, there's not much out there in terms of PC stuff, not unless you want to drop $30k on a system. Granted, a G4 system may run up to $20k, but that will include a WHOLE lot of stuff that's worth your while.

Now while Digital Video is just a fledgling industry, there are some great sites to check out. I highly recommend the 2-pop.com site for questions about ANYTHING related to DV. Another good reference point is ProMax . Don't forget the Apple site for their software (FCP is WAY better than iMovie.

Okay, so it has a pricetag the average consumer might poop themselves over, but it's worth every penny. I produce medium length (5-20 minute) videos for local campus groups at my university, and I've found that if you've got the cash to shell out for the camera ($1000 and UP!) you can afford a system to go with hit. Primary examples would include ProMax Technologies setups complete for a beginner or some guy with a pro-based background. No, there's not much out there in terms of PC stuff, not unless you want to drop $30k on a system. Granted, a G4 system may run up to $20k, but that will include a WHOLE lot of stuff that's worth your while.

Now while Digital Video is just a fledgling industry, there are some great sites to check out. I highly recommend the 2-pop.com site for questions about ANYTHING related to DV. Another good reference point is ProMax . Don't forget the Apple site for their software (FCP is WAY better than iMovie.

Yup, Fantom, FirePower, LaCie, ProMax, and others all have current products.