SDV has been updated so that it will run without the proprietary Pinnacle card that ships with the unit . . . make that 'ships with the software'. This functionality was added to accommodate an outrcry from laptop users who wanted to be able to work remotely with the software, but had no room for the card.

Works just fine, also.

Folks at SF are probably tired of my old tune about SDV's superiority over VV in the capture/print to tape area. Pinnacle touts their capture capability because it can capture in low res, allowing you to rough edit (or final edit if you want), then, recapture in full resolution only the footage (gigabytes) required for your final output. While a useful feature, far more important to me is SDV's capture reliability (am I the only user of VV who experiences soundtrack truncation during capture . . . and sound/video sync problems . . . and unreliable print to tape functionality with SFvidcap???), and its ability to play to my camcorder (with no tape cassette inserted), and, hence, pass the entire production over the firewire, through my DV camcorder into my SVHS VCR without a glitch. I just finished passing a 2-hour (well, make that just short of a two-hour) piece via firewire. No problems.

SFvidcap can play the video over firewire (preview to external video) but cannot print audio and video to tape unless a tape is in the source camcorder.

I love VV, and it is vastly superior to the Pinnacle product as an editing tool, but, in this area of capture/output to DV, it falls far short of the Pinnacle product (on my equipment, at any rate).

Caruso (edited for what I hope is better clarity - 6/24/01 7:15 PM ET)