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Building a Video Editing Box?
RexDart asks: "I'm building a new AMD64/939 box and would like to build into the system: capabilities to capture video from analog and digital sources; edit; add text and overlays; and maybe do the occasional DVE. This is for home movies, wedding videos and occasional project for work. This will be a dual boot Linux (Red Hat or Ubuntu most likely) / WinXP system. Open source, free, software would be ideal (Audacity will definitely be installed), but commercial solutions are not out of the picture. I'd like to keep the media production on the Linux side of the system and reserve WinXP for gaming, but is Linux up to the task?"
"Given the above considerations, the questions:
1) What's a good recommendation for video capture hardware?
2) What's a good recommendation for software?
I don't expect a definitive answer, but would like to narrow the starting points of my research.
Thanks!"
1) What's a good recommendation for video capture hardware?
2) What's a good recommendation for software?
I don't expect a definitive answer, but would like to narrow the starting points of my research.
Thanks!"
Soto voce: homemade porn flicks.
$6.21 is the number of the beast before sales tax. Meh.
I've never used it myself but I understand that cinepaint (aka movie gimp) has been used to edit several hollywood movies, and it's GPL.
No, it's not. Get a Mac, and you'll have all the tools you need, the ability to play a few games, and a Unix OS to satisfy your geek side.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
As I type this, I'm looking over at my new Athlon 64 3500+ system I've been building. Unfortunately, the darn thing was shipped without a CPU heatsink so while I've got the new system put together, I am waiting for the heatsink to be delivered before I can try it out. It seems 939 parts are pretty scarce around here.
I'll be very interested in responses here because I don't have a video capture card installed and am looking into it.
My system is an MSI K8N Neo2, 1GB DDR400, GEForce 6800GT 256MB, 2x300GB Seagate SATA Barricuda drives, 1 Sony DVD drive, 1 Sony dual-layer DVD+/- burner.
I too would like to run dual boot. The last time I set up a PC this way, I installed Windows second and it wiped out my partitioning that Unix set up.
If I want to do dual boot with XP and Linux (or better yet FreeBSD), what should I install first?
kino http://kino.schirmacher.de/
avidemux http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/
cinelerra http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3
For capture hardware you can save yourself some hassle by looking at the analog firewire converters like the Canopus ADVC line.
This way, you never need to worry about drivers, just plug the thing into a firewire port and it makes any analog device look like a firewire camera.
I have the older ADVC100, and it makes capture easy. I can move the thing from computer to computer and platform to platform with no problems.
I forgot the point that the video arrives as a DV stream regardless of the original format. So plug in your vcr or older legacy camera (like hi-8) and get DV captures directly into the computer.
http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/ CinePaint is painting and retouching software primarily used for motion picture frame-by-frame retouching and dust-busting http://www.linux1394.org/ For Firewire Tools
if you bothered to even google it, you'd find this site.
/not even worthy of wasting /. time...
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I've only done DV over firewire capture, and for that I would guess that any old firewire card would be fine. For analog capture, I'd look into using a Hauppauge 250 for capture. Just `cat /dev/video0 > /home/me/projects/bills-wedding/capture.mpeg`. You could also get the 350 which does hardware mpeg decoding (and you could hook a crt up to the tv out, too.)
The only thing that absolutely stinks about video on linux is the choice of mpeg codecs. I can do everything I need to create a decent looking movie, but once I mpegify it to burn it to dvd, the picture quality looks terrible (to my eyes, anyway. some people say it looks fine). I just got a Hauppauge 250 so I could do all my editing/compositing in DV, write that back to the camera via firewire, then capture the final cut with a dedicated hardware mpeg card over analog connections.
I actually looked into getting an old mac that I could stick in my garage and remotely mpegify my final cuts and burn them. At the time it was too much money for what I was doing (and I never did figure out how to script iMovie anyway), but it may be worth it to you.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
A hidden feature of the ADVC-100 (not sure about the newer models) ... press and hold the button for 15 seconds - the unit now strips Macrovision.
The slower MacMini configured with the larger hard drive and the DVD writer costs $649, and includes iMove and iDVD.
Compare this to the price of:
a DVD writer
a firewire card
an 80Gb drive
movie editing software
DVD authoring software
Use your exisiting mouse, keyboard and screen (consider the belkin KVM switch if you'll be giving it heavy use).
Once you factor in the knowledge that you'll have a tried and tested set-up, good software, no driver issues, a shallow learning curve, and just 1 small desirable multi-purpose box on your desk rather than 3 or 4 specialist ones, then it makes a lot of sense to think of the MacMini as a video editing box in addition to your Linux machine, the fact that it has it's own CPU and OS rather than inhabiting the same beige shell isn't really that relevant.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Our lab could really use some integration of microscope still shots and closed circuit video into our LabVIEW front-ends.
Unfortunately, National Instruments wants like $1500 for their video capture cards, which is like ten or twenty times the cost of a comparable WinFast/Hauppauge/ATi solution, i.e. NI is charging you like $100 for the hardware and $1400 for the LabVIEW drivers [the so-called "NI-IMAQ" library].
I did a ton of Googling, and the best I could find was the ADLINK Technologies Angelo RTV-24:
at about $360: That's still about three to six times the price of the WinFast/Hauppauge/ATi solution, but it's not quite as stratospheric as the NI solution.Anyway, does anyone have any experience with affordable LabVIEW still shot/closed circuit video capture, and do you have any recommendations on what to try [and, maybe even more importantly, what to avoid trying]?
THANKS!
...you really might as well go Windows all the way. Periodically I look at the Linux tools for video capture/video editing. As far as I'm concerned, they're not there yet, which is a large part of the reason that I still have Windows on my desktop. There are some really advanced filtering tools on Windows so you can really make your final product shine. Check out AVISynth and its related documentation, as well as VirtualDUB (if you're going the mpeg-4 route) our QuENC (if you're going the mpeg-1 or mpeg-2 route).
Also, if you ever intend on doing analog captures, you should consider using a striped raid array for a scratch drive for capturing. This way you can capture losslessly compressed AVI (with HuffYUV) and have as much data to work with. Be wary though that you should try to capture in a multiple of your final resolution--the less pixel interpolation you do when resizing, the better.
Could you clarify? First of all, what's the "DV Bridge"? And how does this end up in a computer if there isn't a "capture card"?
On a somewhat related point, we've had a problem where some "cards" seem to be able to see Closed Circuit TV signals, and other cards can't see those signals. Unfortunately, I don't know what the name of the standard is [other than generic "NTSC"] that one card can see and the other card can't.
Thanks!
Linux is not up to the task. There are a number of perfectly competent consumer-level Windows applications in the $100 range that will satisfy your needs. Adobe Premiere Elements, Sony Vegas Studio, and Ulead's video application come to mind*.
As for hardware, the easiest approach is to simply make sure you have firewire. I'm assuming that if you're editting videos, you're also shooting them, probably on a digital video camera. Most such cameras have an analog video input. Digitizing an analog source using a DV camera is probably the easiest way to import the analog video into a computer. It avoids the cost of the capture card, the hassle of installing it, and any possible driver issues, and it completely negates problems with your computer dropping frames because, say, the anti-virus software fired up mid-capture. The only downside is the additional time required to dub and then import the analog video, but since neither process requires baby sitting, it may not be a big deal.
*Pinnacle Studio is another possibility, but I had a video project that, after spending many hours working on, decided it would not render until I had removed and re-inserted the various video transitions. Quite obnoxious.
I'm also thinking of buying a machine for videoediting. I'm committed to doing it on linux with open source tools.
The question is: could an HP/IBM laptop handle the load for nonlinear editing and input/output?
Also, is it silly to think that the bus speed for USB2 would exclude the possibility of using USB2 hard drives?
If I'm editing straight video (next to no graphics/animation, etc), is there a point at which extra RAM adds little value?
rj
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Laptop? No. Linux? No.
It looks like you spent some money on that system. Go get VMWARE and forget about dual booting. With VMWARE you can run both operating systems AT THE SAME TIME in different windows. It's much better than rebooting when you want to switch environments.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
People who are answering this question with Linux knowledge are talking about things like checking out the software using CVS. This means they're telling you to get out on the bleeding edge. This may not be good advice if you have work to do and need to be pragmatic. If you're comfortable with that, more power to you, but it would make me a little queasy.
Check your disk space. It gets used up very fast. When I've tried using laptops with external firewire drives, even fancy ones like La Cie, they have not worked well at all; they are too slow. Make sure this is not the case on your laptop before buying it. The best solution I've found is to have your main projects on the laptop and send them off to external hard drives for archiving.
Make sure your laptop of choice has FireWire. I've been in the Apple world for so long that I don't know if this is common in PC laptops. Make sure it is before buying.
All of this being said, I'd seriously consider a PowerBook. You still get Unix tools, and you can get Final Cut Express for $99 with purchase. The PowerBook is similarly priced to high-end IBM laptops. If you don't want to spend that much, the iBook G4 would work fine but the higher screen resolution of the PowerBook's worth the money.
I really think that unless the freedom of open source is a huge advantage to you, you're better off with Apple's proprietary but first-rate solution. That being said, don't rely on external hard drives during production.
Hope that helps.
D
I really appreciate this input.
I'm going to be shooting in another city and it would really help to run things from a laptop.
I'm somewhat anti-Mac (mainly for price reasons), but the discussion here has given me a lot to ponder. People change. Thanks.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
I'm not sure what all the "no" answers are based on, but, my rather simple Gateway PC with RedHat 9 dropped on it has been doing great things for me for years in the video-editing department. The combination of Cinelerra and Blender is absolutely killer. I can render a bunch of animation frames in Blender with an alpha channel, and then easily composite them on DV footage from my firewire-enabled camera in Cinelerra.
I've made actual movies with this and have received some small acclaim for my efforts. It's cheap, it uses stock hardware, and it works. I wouldn't keep using it if it didn't.
Sorry if I sound a little annoyed. Power to you if you're editing movies on a Mac--they're great machines and lots of folks in the industry swear by them. But I'm sick to death of people saying, "Nope! Get a Mac!" It just ain't so.
I agree with most of what you have to say to the parent, but I disagree on the "don't rely on external hard drives during production" bit.
Hard drive speed will make a huge difference, as will whether or not your application, OS, and video are all trying to access the same drive. The price difference between standard laptop drives and higher-speed ones is rather insane, but with a decent FireWire or USB2 enclosure, it's no problem to attach an external high-speed drive or twelve.
You could skate by with the laptop's drive, but you'll get better performance if you at least use the internal drive (Applications, OS, swap) in concert with an external drive (DV). Depending on the solution you're using for editing, you may be able to further increase productivity by adding a third drive to be used as a scratch disk.
The gains to be had with a scratch drive are generally far less than moving your video to a secondary drive, though.
I'm happy to be of help. If you have more questions, let me know.
:-).
If you're in a remote place in temporary surroundings while you're editing video, your stress level is going to be high enough without trying to make bleeding-edge stuff work.
I strongly recommend the Apple/Final Cut platform. Final Cut has served me well as a loyal user since version 1.1 eons ago, and Apple's served me even longer.
I know Apple's pricing can seem painful, but for Windows you'd need Adobe Premiere Pro or similar software. Per dealtime.com, the lowest "trusted store" price is $464.19. If you buy Final Cut Express with a new Mac, it's $99. So you have $363.20 to play with as a price difference for your PowerBook.
My recommended system would be the 15" PowerBook with SuperDrive so you can burn DVDs on the road. If you don't need to do that, the cheaper 15" would do. If you don't mind lugging it around, the 17" is truly spectacular.
I did a price check and had to admit that ThinkPads are a lot cheaper than PowerBooks. You are paying for MacOS X and for the video software, both of which took enormous amounts of time and effort to build. So did Windows, of course, but Bill's spreading the cost over a lot more units than Steve, so his costs are lower. That being said, I think the difference is only about 20-25% when equivalent features are compared, which in my view is not a bad premium for the extra utility you're getting.
So yes, Apple's expensive, but in my view, you get a lot for your money.
Here's some video I shot in an especially stressful situation. Shot on a Canon XL1, edited with Final Cut Pro. Admittedly on a desktop. Glad I didn't risk my laptop over there
D
http://linuxmovies.sourceforge.net/software/index. html
What I want to do is this: I want to capture VHS movies and convert them to DVD. I know DVD video is in mpeg2 so my question is this: can I convert DV to mpeg2 to be burned onto a DVD? I have alot of foreign movies onn VHS (in PAL) that won't play on my NTSC VCR and having all those cassettes lying around is not convenient. Thanks
get a mac??? hell no. only if youd need the design and got lots of money to spend. check out http://www.linuxartist.org/video-anim.html to get a small overview of mostly uptodate gpled apps and tools needed for video editing/animation. e.g. cinerellea - already mentioned. kino - already mentioned mainactor - nle video editing app - free for noncommercial i think blender - 3d modelling/animation/compositing tool http://www.jahshaka.com/ - realtime editing - looks VERY promising but still way to go... ...just found another cool link I forgot in the past with the most used free and professional(expensive) tools used for film generation:
http://linuxmovies.sourceforge.net/software/
nonfree:
toonz - highend 2d animation/compositing app
maya - highend 3d animation/modelling app
softimage XSI - highend 3d animation/modelling app
shake - highend compositing app
hope this helps
cheers
I am building a new AMD64/939 box and would like to build into the system: capabilities to capture video from analog and digital sources; edit; add text and overlays; and maybe do the occasional DVE.
I currently have an analog+digital capture board, and am in the market for a new capture board. I still need to capture analog, but I will simply be purchasing a firewire card.
Analog capture boards are overpriced, and you can acheive the same results with a digital video camera and a firewire (or usb) card.
It's called Analog Passthrough, and most digital video cameras made today support it. Basically, you plug your VCR into the IN jacks on your video camera (with sony's, that analog dongle cable goes both ways), and then you plug your firewire cable into your camera at one end, and the other into your computer.
Make sure there isn't a tape in your camcorder, or this wont work. When you play your VHS tape, it should simply pass through your digital video camera (make sure the camera is on), and into the computer through the firewire cable. I captured 4 hours worth of material in this method two weeks ago, and it works great.
"I currently have an analog+digital capture board, and am in the market for a new capture board."
So do I. Pinnacle Studio Deluxe.
Pinnacle of course will not release any info, or drivers for other than Windows. You can only use Pinnacle studio with it. And C-Cube is apparently bought out, and hence chip info is non-existant.
Outher than that it works fine.
"I still need to capture analog, but I will simply be purchasing a firewire card. Analog capture boards are overpriced, and you can acheive the same results with a digital video camera and a firewire (or usb) card. "
They're not that expensive (analog/digital capture cards), and some people on the cheap use their TV tuner cards as capture devices via composite in. Plus the camcorder plus firefire card's going to cost as well.
I'm fortunate in that the pinnacle has three firewire (with breakout box) plus the Audigy 2 and it's one.
High end machine (for it's time) with SCSI burners and large IDE RAID.
Hehe. The funny thing is that a fully equipped SGI Octane would have kicked the Mac's butt, especially in HDTV.
Don't forget that some of the Sony DV recorders have a TBC built in.
"You don't need to install anything, you don't even need an harddisk to run a whole free software operating system running out of the box on your PC! Download the ISO-image, burn your own CD, reboot your machine and you'll get back true love ;^)
...
dyne:bolic is shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives as a practical tool for multimedia production: you can manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, having automatically recognized most device and peripherals: audio, video, TV, network cards, firewire, usb and more; all using only free software!
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source
Buy a new Mac Mini with Final Cut Express for video editing, and build a separate XP box for gaming.
How about an Amiga?
Many network stations in non-major [not NYC/LA/etc] markets still use NewTek's Amiga-based Video Toaster and Toaster/Flyer systems (The Toaster is a 4-input digital switcher/SEG, the Flyer is the NLE addition) for editing and effects. The Toaster comes with Lightwave (it is a bit slow on the Amiga systems, but it is still a great 3D package). You can pick up full Toaster/Flyer systems on ebay for cheap, and they do wonders. Then, you can transfer flyclips (the Flyer's video clip format) to your PC or Mac and do compositing/rotoscoping/insertion work on it using Mirage and/or Lightwave 3D if you need to.
--
The Amiga may well outlive us all.
Video Production Support
I spent a couple of years as the support for our (small) video dept.
:)
We were running dual proc raided white boxes with a Pinnacle dc 1000/2000 capture card & NT4/2000 Premeire (v.5>6) stack. They were *incredibly* fragile in all combinations.
We ended up hiring a local local VAR Pinnacle support rep. (he was hired for video production not support). He and I had developed a close relationship before he came on board trying to keep these boxes stable, and our close relationship only continued
If you go with a windows solution, *read all you can* about the chipset/capture card/editing software combination you are considering. There are some combinations that will work fairly relibly, and others that will make your life hell/ simply not work.
We followed independent Pinnacle (there product support is ABYSMAL) sites, Premier sites, pretty much any site that was devoted to technical issues
related to low end video editing on Win.
Bluescreening 6 hours into a 12 hour render does not creat happiness.
My recommendation in order:
1)check out Linux/the links above that I have posted. (I wish the current Linux offerings were avaiable back then)
2)Check out Apple (you will pay more). you can run X-windows & Linux apps on PPC.
3)Thouroghly investigate any windows solution stack you are considering.
Keep in mind that with all the CG and related work increasingly done on Linux at all the major CG houses, Linux will probably improve as a media creation platform faster than Apple or Windows (my 2 cents), and the fact that there is an increasingly mature suite of FOSS tools is added gravy.
good luck.
FAT32 + Firewire = HORRIBLE performance
Overall I've been pretty unhappy with Linux support for external drives. Througput and performance are nowhere close to the performance of the same drive under Windows, especially if the drive is FAT32. (In general, the Linux FAT32 drivers suck performance-wise. Combine them with 1394 and it gets REALLY bad.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I do all of my DV editing (mostly family movies starring my 1 year daughter) using Kino on my Linux laptop running Ubuntu.
With Kino's Edit screen, I can do rough cuts very quickly. When I'm happy about the order of the scenes, I click the Trim tab and trim the cuts, controlling in and out-points down to the frame. The FX sceen allows me to add a lot of nice effects and transitions. The whole process is completely non-destructive.
For capture, I use a Sony TRV-900 3xCCD camcorder. It was recognized by the Kino as soon as I had created the raw1394 and dv1394 device nodes (I had to to it manually, but that was the only quirk).
When I'm done editing, I simply click the Export tab. From there, I can choose any output format I like, be it DVD, VCD a DV file or export a master tape back to the camera. It even multiplexes the video and sound for me, so burning a DVD is very easy. (Kino won't allow me to create chapters and menus the way iMovie/iDVD do, though.)
All in all, I'm a very happy Kino user. I sincerely recommend it to anyone interested in DV editing on Linux.
there is a lot of heavyweight film (and video) software that runs on linux (shake comes to mind), a bunch of internal projects for specific projects (massive, for example). There's also some bad ass software for irix (inferno, flame, smoke) by discreet. but all of this is in the 50K - 1M dollar range.
not what we're talking about here. for professional editing it's an avid world, with FCP making slight inroads. everything else pales in comparison (and most of it, unusable, IMHO). And given that you can get a DV version of FCP for 299 (or 99 if you buy it w/ a machine), why would anyone use anything else?
As for post production, motion and combustion are nice, but not really industry standard. Most internal or lower end stuff is done in After Effects (often mixed with lightwave/maya/c4d/etc) while high end stuff goes to a flame/inferno suite (flame doesn't run on mac btw), or a Avid|DS or some such.
-a
I haven't seen it mentioned, but Kino is a great DV editing program for Linux.
It does capture/export back to the camera, has export options for converting to DVD/(S)VCD with the click of a button, has a lot of filters built in (especially good are the EffecTV filters).
I've been using it on my Duron 800 with a generic Firewire card for capture and it goes ok, although rendering effects is a bit slow. It also can't quite keep up exporting back to the camera when jumping around lots of scenes in different files. You won't have any trouble with a newer machine.
No association with the above projects, just a satisfied user.
Does anyone know if the canopus ADVC-110 retains this feature of turning off macrovision protection?
Look into the hardware requirements for the video editing software you want to use first. This will save you a lot of time and headaches later.
I've seen people pulling their hair out trying to configure/troubleshoot a PC box for video. This is one of those overlooked steps that might make it a little easier.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Sounds like I'll have to try the latest version of Kino... it was a pain to use the last time I tried it, but that was over a year ago. Most of the video that I edit is in-car or on-car footage from my race car, so I just need a simple solution that can do basic editing and doesn't take a lot of my time, but quality is important. Had the MacMini come out a couple of years ago, I would have bought one.
What I've been doing is to do the firewire video capture in Linux using dvgrab and ffmpeg to encode it, then reboot to Windows XP (I know, I know) and use Windows Movie Maker 2, which is surprisingly nice for simple video editing. I have also tried the ULead video editing software, but it's slow and is a pain to use.
I do the capture in Linux because 1) it works better and more reliably, 2) ffmpeg makes deinterlacing easy, and 3) it's higher quality so I can keep the original unedited footage without saving the tapes.
There is no way in hell I'm going to use a Mac until they allow in the interface to resize windows from all directions. The interface is pretty, I'm sure it's strong, but I've never seen something so lame as to constrict a user from only resizing a window from the small stainless steel right side corner.
Even if final cut pro is the best software for it. It's not even a money issue, it's only this windowing problem.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
Is Linux up to the task? It depends on how much video work you do. I do video processing work nearly everyday. Regarding Macs, they are great, but there isn't as broad a range of tuners and capture cards available for the Mac as there are for Windows. For the Mac I recommend the Elgato products, namely the upcoming EyeTV Wonder (done in partnership with ATI). Generally speaking, you will pay a premium for going with Mac video equipment. Of course you will also minimize many of the problems videographers face providing you are working with clean video. Despite how many people feel about Windows, Windows makes a great video processing platform. Some of the best video processing software out there such as AviSynth, DScaler, VirtualDub, and VirtualDub MPEG exists as open-source Windows apps. TMPGEnc and Womble are world-class applications for working with MPEG. MPEG2 can be a real expensive pain to edit properly. Linux really adds to the power of PC-based video work.
Moving on, video capturing on Linux itself isn't very mature. There are a lot of older Brooktree BT8x8 chipset based tuners supported, but most of the newer (and better quality tuners) chipsets, namely the Philips SAA* based tuners are supported only under Windows using WDM drivers. Linux support is growing though. There are a couple of projects in Linux to bring video capturing over (thank God), but the greatest successes to date have been in getting digital tuners to work.
In any case, don't just accept any product recommendation. As someone who has a garage full of video equipment, I suggest you consider your needs and interests before settling on any specific product. There is a list of things I always ask people to consider:
What broadcast standards will you be working with, PAL, SECAM, NTSC? Will you be capturing TV feeds using your computer? Do you need to be able to schedule recordings using your computer as a PVR? Will you be mastering DVDs for commercial use? Do you have the time (and the desire) to post-edit your capture files before converting them, or would you rather get it all done in one shot? Do you prefer hardware-based MPEG encoding, or do you have a need to capture at full resolution uncompressed AVI format (AVI is not really a format)? Will you need to be mobile with your gear?
There are some caveats you will need to consider. There are many video capture devices out there that are designed specifically for video conversion. They lack tuners so you cannot use these devices to turn your TV into an effective timeshifting PVR. USB tuners are very attractive, but if you buy one, you will generally be limited to using the vendor-supplied capture software. DV capture devices using FireWire are few and far between in the Windows world, and those that exist, such as Pinnacle's MovieBox DV sometimes have problems with analog sources, making them ill-suited to all-around capturing. Hardware MPEG encoders free up your CPU cycles and memory by doing much of the work for you. Capturing raw AVI can really strain your system, but MPEG2 is a poor editing format that often requires you to purchase pricey MPEG tools. Also, the MPEG2 encoders in most consumer grade capture devices are not the same quality of those used in mastering commercially sold DVD, so it's best to get an MPEG2 encoder that can handle at least 12 Mbps bitrates.
In your case, I'd recommend a PCI based tuner, preferably with a Philips chipset, but a newer Brooktree-based tuner will give you a stronger guarantee of cross-platform support. I'd recommend using a tuner that doesn't use hardware MPEG encoding since you'll likely be editing your captures anyway whether it is to remove commercials or to add special effects or titles. You'll probably want to stay away from USB-based tuners for the time being until we see more support in Linux for Philips-based products. Depending on your location, you'll want a tuner that can capture at full frame, 720x420 NTSC or 720x576 PAL/SECAM.
In any case, there are two real good communities
Ignore my user number. I've been here longer than most of you. (on Slashdot, in Purgatory, and at most retail checkouts)
I use an HP zd7010 series notebook for my video editing. It has a nice widescreen, and the drive has handled video capturing very well for what must be a few thousand hours of straight capturing I've done so far.
the problem with these stock computers is that the components are pretty underpowered. This is as true of the so-called gaming system desktop makers like Dell churn out. You probably don't want to capture raw AVI on your laptop (space issues notwithstanding), but a hardware-based tuner will certainly ease the strain a lot. My personal USB based preference is Pinnacle System's PCTV USB2. It is the only one I've seen with quality DV capture, optional MPEG 1 & 2 capture (no cap on MPEG1 resolution), and quality audio. Unfortunately, the audio downmixes stereo to mono, but it still sounds great.
If you go with a laptop, you need to be aware that most USB tuners pass audio through a separate stereo jack requiring a soundcard line-in. It's a bit idiot considering the primarily market for USB tuners, but there are few (Pinnacle and Hauppauge included that send audio over USB).
I tried capturing from USB2 tuners to USB2 hard drives. I wasn't dissatisfied. Providing you minimize all disk reads and writes on your main drive, you'll be okay. Be aware of antivirus software, and the usual apps that like to make sudden drastic reads.
If I'm editing straight video (next to no graphics/animation, etc), is there a point at which extra RAM adds little value?
RAM isn't really the issue in video capturing. Video capturing is a function of encoder speed, available bandwidth, and hard drive speed. Of course memory and CPU have an effect as well. You'll definitely want to have the appropriate amount of memory and CPU for your system, but you will want to have your system tuned for video capturing. That gets back to the first three options. Certain codecs are pretty heavyweight (DivX comes to mind), so they aren't the best for on-the-fly capturing. If you have 128MB available, I'd go with HuffYUV or a MJPEG codec if you can't do MPEG1 above 320x240. I'd stay away from WMV, MPEG2, or MPEG-4 unless you can do it in your capture hardware. For video editing, you'll need a lot of memory to smoothly shuttle through uncompressed AVI or HuffYUV encoded video. A lot of it though will depend on how well your video editing software is designed. I use Womble MPEG-VCR for cutting MPEG2s when I don't plan to convert the format. I use Virtual Dub for linear editing and Premiere Pro for nonlinear editing. Virtual Dub is sleek and fast. You can do a lot with a little, and it's got a plugin filter system, making it infinitely extendable (like Photoshop or GIMP). Premiere is still a beast. I don't know about Cinelerra. I'm still in the process of turning my laptop video toaster into a Linux box. I will be keeping updates on my success though in my journal.
Ignore my user number. I've been here longer than most of you. (on Slashdot, in Purgatory, and at most retail checkouts)