does the firewire card or video card have anything to do with the quality captured?

Or is everything the same?

Or is everything the same?

All firewire cards perform the same.

In higher end systems, you can capture via SDI which can lead to slightly more generation loss but may have workflow advantages.

Anyways, just stick with firewire.

I agree, Firewire is great for digital video and the quality is generally superb. I have a capture card for getting stuff off my 16mm and various VCR's, DVD players, etc., but the best quality IMO comes from my Firewire port. And they're so less expensive

Lloyd, DV is data -- 1s and 0s. All you need to worry about is capturing all of them; it doesn't matter what you capture them over.

Think of a video file as a Word document -- download it from the Internet; open it from a floppy disc or a CD; get it as an attachment in e-mail -- the delivery method doesn't matter; Word will still open it and it will look the same no matter how you got it.

Transferring video into your computer is no different. If you've got all the bits, the video file will be identical no matter what kind of hardware you brought it in with. Video cards do not affect capture, and the only thing you need to worry about with firewire cards is that they work. None affects the data if it's working properly.

thanks for the explanation guys

thought my laptop captured worse than my PC, but I guess it's just my old eyes

It's been stressed that IF you capture the whole "file", quality is identical from system to system. But, if what you're seeing on laptop captures is jerky, for example, you may be dropping frames during capture because the drive is too slow or competing with too many other operations running at the same time. You may also be comparing a laptop screen to a CRT monitor. Or, none of this might be true ;-)

David Hurdon

I was going to mention that if I relied on my LCD monitor, I would think I was shooting with an 8mm handycam instead of a GL2. It just gets it all wrong. Grain where there is none, blurred edges. You MUST preview on a CRT.