Which DV/AV editing card to buy?

[darkovo666]

I'm getting into DV Cam editing on my PC and although the Firewire card is OK for my DV Camcorder using Ulead Moviefactory v3, I would also like to back-stuff-up from VHS video & Sky+.

I've got a crappy WinTV Go card that allows AV input but the encoding is software based and pretty choppy if I'm trying to also encode it to MPEG2 etc, and the PC starts grinding to a halt. OK I could just backup to an AVI but this is then massive and still then needs converting later, also the quality of the video is still pretty crap anyway.

What I'm after is a Video editing card that has on-board video encoding chip (or something) that takes the stress off my PC system – so does most of the work itself. This will then allow me to convert movies to a file format I can then burn to DVD without too many steps in between.
I am not bothered about having a TV/Satellite tuner on my PC – just want a card that helps with AV/S-Video/Firewire movie backing-up.

By the way my PC is just a P3 1GHZ with 512MB RAM & 120GB HDD with DVD Burner; DV Cam hasn't got AV/DV-in which would have been nice!!

Please help suggest a decent card.

[Brian110507]

Maybe you need something like this :-
http://www.simplydv.co.uk/Reviews/canopus_advc55.html

[MarkE19]

The ADVC55 suggested by Beejaycee is a great device and will get the best possible quality out of your captured footage. All you will then need is software that can capture and convert to MPEG-2 on the fly such as Ulead DVD MovieFactory 3. The only problem with this is that it is all PC CPU based and I don't it will work with your PC as it says on the box that for this feature you need P4 1.8Ghz or equivelent processor. But you could still use this software to capture as AVI files and then do the conversion overnight and burn to DVD in the morning. You PC is good enough for that.

Mark.

[darkovo666]

Thanks for the link and advice, I will have a good look at this device and make up my mind.
Also I will think about upgrading my PC too.

Many thanks