What's the difference between a video card, a video capture card, and a video editing card?

All PCs have a video card, also called the graphics card. If you didn't have one you'd have nowhere to plug your monitor into. The video card fits either into the AGP slot or the PCI slot of the motherboard, depending on what type you have. (Some cheaper PCs have the video card integrated into the motherboard). At the back of the PC you'll see a bit of your video card which has a socket for your monitor. 

Video capture and video editing cards are additional cards that fit into PCI slots and co-exist with the video card.  Video capture cards are the cheaper ones. They provide you with a socket for your camcorder. Some of them provide you with plugs for both analogue (S-Video input/composite) and digital (DV or digital video) camcorders. With analogue capture cards you want to enquire whether there are both input and output sockets. Digital connectors can both send and receive video clips.

Video editing cards have specialist hardware built into the cards. This hardware is dedicated to video editing tasks like rendering and MPEG encoding. The better video editing cards are real-time editing cards. Most people see these as very expensive. We see them as free. Yes, free... When you pay £500 for a good video editing card the chances are that in addition to the card, cables, manuals etc you are also getting a professional video editing software package that would normally cost £500-£600 on its own, like Adobe Premiere.

What type of video card do I need for video editing?

The video card has very little - if anything - to do with video editing. Whatever you're looking at on your monitor, whether it's a DVD movie, a game, an email, or a document, that picture is coming from the video card, and that's what the video card does i.e. sending signals to your monitor. Ideally you don't want the cheapest, most basic video card in a video editing PC. But you don't need the latest all singing and all dancing video card which is probably designed to appeal to gamers anyway. 

However, it is useful to have features like dual-head support (also called twin head, dual monitor, hydra vision etc). This allows you to plug two monitors into your video card and gives you an extended desktop i.e. a lot more screen real estate. You'll enjoy working with videos when you can spread your work over two screens. It's useful to be able to have your main video editing window, timeline etc on one monitor and your bin, output window, effects windows etc on the second monitor. It helps productivity enormously. Another useful feature to have is TV Out via an S-Video socket. This allows you to connect a TV set to the PC to be used as a monitor.

What's the difference between DV, Firewire, IEEE1394, I-Link and DV-I?

DV stands for digital video. The plugs used to connect a DV camera to a PC are called DV, Firewire, or IEEE1394 plugs. They are all just different names for the same thing. The DV/Firewire/IEEE1394 plugs come in two sizes. You'll often find that DV cables have a small plug at one end that fits into the camcorder, and a larger plug at the other end that connects to the PC. Professional video editing cards tend to have both types of sockets so they can accommodate whatever DV cable you happen to have. I-Link is Sony's name for DV.

DV-I on the other hand is the interface for the monitor. It's the type of socket you get on video cards that allow you to plug in an LCD screen that supports a digital connection to the video card. It has nothing to do with video editing.

What is IEEE 1394b?

There is a new standard of Firewire called IEEE 1394b offering double the speeds of traditional firewire (up to 800 MB/sec). IEEE1394 plugs won't fit into a IEEE 1394b socket. Note also that most of the new IEEE 1394b cards are 64 bit cards and fit into server motherboards but don't fit into standard motherboards used in the average home PC and video editing PC.

How much of hard disk space do I need for video?

There is no definite answer to this. You are the best judge. The storage requirements do depend on the format of the video, the quality (number of frames per second), and other factors, but the most important is how many minutes or hours of video you intend to store on your PC. Read our article on choosing hard disks for video editing. Uncompressed video (in AVI format) takes up around 100 GB per hour. Fortunately, compression into formats that lose very little of the original quality can save you a lot of space. The main compression formats are:

MJPEG: capable of video up to S-VHS quality
Indeo: Intel’s format, mostly used for video on websites
Cinepak: The compression format used in QuickTime files
DV: Used by Digital Camcorders, very similar to MPEG-2
MPEG: High compression ratio, tops out at VHS quality
MPEG-2: Format used by DVD extremely high quality

Bear in mind three things:

1. You are probably going to be capturing in AVI format which does take up a lot of space so even if you compress your clips later you do need to have enough space to capture the original clip/s.

2. Actually, you need more than that. You need space to host BOTH the original clip and the compressed version. It's only after the compression has been completed that you can delete the original.

3. You do need to always have some space free on your hard disk for the Windows swap file (called temporary memory). 

What is rendering? What is real-time editing?

When you apply an effect, a title or change you need to set it up in the video editing software and let the computer apply that change to every frame in your video clip. While setting up the effects/changes can take only a few seconds actually applying that effect to 86400 frames (roughly what you have in an hour's worth of video) can take hours if not days. A lot depends on the speed of your PC and whether you have a real-time video editing card. With a real-time video editing card it should usually take only about an hour to render a 60 minute clip.

Not all real time is the same. Some cards call themselves real-time cards but they may offer only real-time "preview" i.e. you can see how the effects appear in a small, low resolution version of your clip. If you do want to see the final version of the clip you still have to render it. 

The good cards will offer most effects and a fairly large number of "streams" in real time mode. Some cards and software packages go even further and do the rendering in the background so that when you want to see what the final version of your clip looks like there is no rendering to be done and it's all ready for viewing. 

When choosing a card remember that it has to be carefully matched to the other components in your PC and to the video editing software you are using. This is nightmare industry for incompatibilities problems, driver conflicts and other such issues. Unlike your average home PC this setup does take some expertise to get right. If you fancy yourself as a nerd and ENJOY opening your PC up all the time, downloading and applying patches, and using trial and error to solve problems, then by all means give it a shot. If getting the job done is of prime importance - and you regard computers as a necessary evil but one that you need to work with to get your job done - then leave the building of your video editing solution to a company who specialise in the field.

Why do I need a video editing card when I can settle for a  fast PC and good video editing software?

Good question. Today's fast PCs do make lighter work of video editing. Do remember though that video editing is the most demanding of any task you are likely to ask your PC to perform. It requires more power and speed than the latest and fastest games. No matter how fast your PC there are some video editing tasks that can slow it down to a snail's pace. The hardware in the average PC is general purpose hardware and not designed specifically for video editing. That makes it not very efficient at video tasks. That's where a dedicated real time video editing card comes in handy. When you consider that a good video editing software package will set you back £500 - £700 and that a real time video editing card costs about £500 but comes with a free copy of the editing software it makes sense to buy the card and get the software for free. Also, having the card means that you'll have all the connectors and cables you need, other utilities like encoding and conversion tools, DVD creation software, and various other bits that are invaluable to the video editor.

What's the difference between the various videotape formats? 

...like VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS-C or Super-VHS-C, 8mm, Hi8 or high-band 8mm, Digital 8, DV or MiniDV or Digital Videocassette and DVCAM / DVPRO. There are various good guides on the internet covering this. Please try these links:  1 and 2.

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