Possibly a stupid question but up to now I've only worked with DV in Vegas 4 so bear with me. Can I capture and work with uncompressed avi files using the s-video input of a Winnov card? If so which would be the best codec to use? Sorry if this is all wrong...
Most probably you can. Vegas will pretty much handle just about anything you can throw at it. The question is not what Vegas can do with it but what format can you capture in. Uncompressed will work fine, but the files will be enormous and editing may be slow. There are several codecs available, but keep in mind that once you've used a codec to compress the video it's no longer uncompressed. Huffyuv is a lossless compression that cuts the file size in about half. That might be a good starting point.
I guess Winnov is the brand name. Someone recommended it to me because they are very cheap and get the job done. Thanks for that response. I think I'll pick one up from eBay and give it a try.
Kurt, why not spend a few extra bucks and get a firewire card and a Canpus unit? That way, you can run your video into the canopus AVDC100 (or 300 or wahtever you choose) and have the signal come out DV ready and ait will take up MUCH less room on your hard drive.
I know that's the easier way to go and I actually own a firewire card already but I could pick up that analog card for $20 and save myself the money on the Canopus. Are there any differences in quality between capturing an uncompressed signal and the DV ready signal the Canopus will give me? I mean if HD space weren't a concern (and I don't think it will be) wouldn't it be wiser to go the uncompressed route?
Here's the thing, uncompressed is potentially better than DV. However, you also have to consider the capture hardware. The Canopus converter is probably going to give you close to the best DV capture possible (which is really pretty darned good!). On the other hand, a $20 capture card is probably going to produce rather stinky uncompressed video.
As one who's captured analog in Vegas, I'd say Stay Away. It's not feasible to work with (Large file sizes) and the results are sometime sub par. I don't know why, but some of the analog captured w/Vegas had horrible choppiness. Wherever there was motion, such as a pan, or someone moving across the screen, the picture was choppy. I captured it w/ a canopus advc 100 and all the choppiness went away. Plus, I didn't fill an entire hard drive w/ 40 minutes of video.