[QUOTE=Mike]
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Originally Posted by paulyoung666
another point is .......... , is your hard drive 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm , you risk dropping frames if it is the former speed 
Really showing my lack of knowledge .................how do I confirm rpm on my HD ??? |
If you find out the name/make/serial number of your hardrive and google it you should be able to find out.
More important that the actual spindle speed of the HD (though obviously related) is the actual real world throughput you can achieve on your system as far as sustain writing of data to the HD goes. There are many utilites / testers that should be able to calculate this foryou, though I can't think of one of the top of my head right now. I am pretty sure someone here can suggest one. If not then I'll try and find one for you. (actually I think this would probably do the trick
http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/index.ht...86&langx=en&a=)
How much throughput you need is a difficult calculation and depends on many factors, though principaly the resolution of the digitised video stream and the compression used. In very rough terms digitising at 720*576 and using standard mpeg2 compression (common settings) you would want (and this is a rough guess) around 7MB/s throughput or more on writing data out to the HD.
going back a step another approach to getting the video 'into' the computer would be to use a digital recording device to 'digitise' the video. If for example you had a DV video camera (and provided it has a firewire data output on it) you could record from analogue video to the digital DV camcorder (which does the digitisation for you). Then connect the DV camcorder to a firewire port on the comptuer (you may need to buy a firewire card if you comptuer does not have one already) and 'simply' transfer the digital data from the camcorder to the HD. With this approach the writing speed of the HD does not matter because the computer can say to the camcorder 'wait a minute while I write that out', which it can't do when you are digitising a live analogue feed from a vcr.
It's pretty hard to give more specific advice really without knowing a lot more about what your 'application' is. If it's just a case of wanting to transfer some personal VHS tapes to digital format on the computer then personally I would for a grpahics card with video in facilites. Something like an ATI AIW 9600 or 9800 would do the job and would cost from about £100-£300 depending on which model you choose.