firewire card vs. analog card

I've been capturing movies off my satellite, vcr, dvd player and recently off my digi8 cam using analog card successfully for more than a year now, vcd compliant with my hp cel 500mhz. My questions are, how much better capturing via firewire over analog card and can my cel 500mhz handle dv capture? I'm planning to get a firewire card for my dv cam. Thnx.
 
Yes firewire captures can be good but does your Satelite, VCR & DVD Player have Firewire output? Your new Digi8 may, I doubt the others will.
 
Thnx for your reply. I intend to use the firewire card solely for my digi8 and will keep my analog card for other captures. Picture quality wise, how much better is dv capture over analog and can my cel 500mhz handle dv capture?
 
Yep that sounds good. I'm not into DV myself but from what I've read, you can make some very good DVD quality stuff via Firewire and a good source.

Your Celery 500 may be a bit slow for DV work however.
 
From a DV source such as your Digi8 camera there will be a marked improvement using Firewire. The frirewire card transfers the DV File from the camera on to the PC. That means the Video file is transfered and not Captured as per the analogue method.

What this means is that the quality is kept, no lose of quality due the analogue signal being encoded and will remain good quality over many generations unlike analogue which will deterate at every copy. To be able to maintain the multi-generation copies you will need a camare a that allows DV-in as well as DV-out many European models do not allow DV-in.
 
Thank you all for your replies. I have 27 gigs just for my video files and I will only use my digi8 cam for home made movies like birthdays, school activities, things like that for about 30 minutes to 1 hr. the most. I know encoding will be slow but it will be a short movie only with some effects. Do you think my Cel 500 will drop frames like crazy? I'm planning to make svcds or cvds (not vcds) coz I don't have a dvd burner yet. I know firewirecards are cheap too. Do you think it's worth it? And btw, my digi8 cam has dv in/out.
 
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my pent III 400 was to slow.. i was dropping frames left and right
now i have a pent 4 2.2 and it works like a dream..
 
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