While a firewire card may be $50, an Analog to Digital converter that uses firewire is much more than that.

If you can swing it, I recommend the Canopus ADVC-100 converter which is external, connects to any firewire card, and works great for external monitor preview.

Craig

It's not the card thats the proplem. the firewire adapter for a DVCPro VCR is around $500. That's the expensive part.

Unfortunitly, buying more hardware is not an option. It was hard enough to convince my boss that Vegas would be a better choice then Premiere, and unless I can come up with an hour long presentation on why we need some new piece of hardware, chances are I'll get it's not worth it (i'm exagerating here). so, anyone know any other good codec's besides huffy?

Somewhat depends on your current analogue card. Assuming it can capture uncompressed (like Conexant Fusion878 and 88x): www.jpg.com Pegasus Imaging PICVideo is similar to DV in that it has constant quality settings. Q=19 is good, 20=v.good, 21=best IMHO.

Uncompressed is also good, but maybe you don't have the disc space or the sustainable data transfer rate. (though a single IDE drive, such as a 2MB cache U133 Maxtor 160GB would be enough from my tests across its entire area). YUY2.AVI or a competitive AVI.

Lastly, the DigiSuite codec pack has an MJPEG lossless mode which many modern PCs can acquire with. This sort of spans Huffy and PICvideo in a single package. I think I used this OK with ShowShifter and a LeadTek WinTV2000XP SVIDEO capture card. Should be OK with a full DigiSuite, DPS Reality, or Video Toaster too (and the right capture software, maybe Vegas VidCapture4...)

As you probably know by now, HUFYUV is cool but there are are some compatibility prob in and out of Vegas in my experience. Pegasus makes a whole line of mjpeg codecs, and their picvideo is close to a standard, though you might have to also be careful in my experience with the field setting for the codec itself when importing these into Vegas. Leadtech is another option.

Depending on your capture capabilities, intended frame size etc., going stright to wmv or mpg2 at higher data rates (&/or with only i-frames in mpg2) might be an option. Uncompressed works as noted earlier, and is 'bout the only thing you can use with Vegas capture, but is rather huge obviously.

Quik Tip: you might have prob. using various capture apps (or apps that include capture capabilities) in XP (possibly win2k) with the ATI multimedia software installed -> rename the folder containing the ati software and this goes away - can always switch it back as needed.

I tried capturinghigh quality mpeg-2 files to edit with, but then Vegas boggs down to a crawl when working with a couple of these at a time. Actuatly, that's the reason I convinced my boss to buy Vegas instead of Premiere. :)

I'll try the renameing the ATI folder. It's worth a shot. Is there a way to replace Vidcap with the ATI capture utility? When I tried, it started the ATI file player (to capture you need a command line switch which Vegas doesn't support... a new feature that can be in V4.0c!)

RE: the mpeg2 files, have you tried this with a file captured using all I-frames? Might not be as fast as avi files, but it should be faster and is definitely more accurate as VV4 doesn't have to extrapolate the frames in between the I-frames as on a traditional mpg2 structure (you're only capturing keyframes, same as with motion jpeg avis, just in another format).

For captureing, whilest I havn't done more then some quick testing, ATI's mmcenter 8.1 does let you capture avi's using whatever capture codec you choose. It is also supposed to span 2 gig files if that is an issue, though I don't know how well.

Using the SOFO capture utility in Vegas, I haven't been able to see any way to use a compression codec other then the windows std yuv stuff. It does work in situations where your capture card has a hardware codec attached (as with a matrox card) -- maybe there is a way to insert something into the registry to associate a certain codec with the ati card and then it would show up? Or this may just be a limitation of the windows driver setup as windows moves away from vfw to wdm.

For vfw capture, some alternatives are V/Dub (virtualdub.org), AVI_IO, & freevcr. You can also use most of the Ulead apps - their video studio can be had free or for next to nothing - though file spanning doesn't work. [I still like the Ulead/Ligos mpg2 codec]

I tried the all I-frame mpeg-2's like you suggestedd and it worked quite well. I captured just over 2 minutes of video @ 640x480 and the size was about 160mb. Much better then the 4 gigs I had using the uncompressed AVI's. Thanks for the tip!

I can't get MMC 8.1 w/o paying more $$$. It's a free upgrade for people who own a Radeon 8500 or better. But I can choose the codec, and I'm going to install Huffy, just incase someone wants to use it. I use it at home with my el-cheapo $30 capture card.

When I use the Vegas Vidcap, I sometimes have crashing problems with the ATI card. It also only supports YUV compression, which doesn't help in the space issue. I'll stick to using the ATI capture utility until Vidcap can access the codec/compression settings for the AIW.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions!