Ulead MEDIASTUDIO PRO 6.0, User Manual

Page: 86 / 360

MEDIASTUDIO PRO USER GUIDE 86
Tips for capturing good video and audio
Capturing video is a memory intensive exercise that puts all your system’s
resources to the test. As you might expect, the better your system, the
better the results. Below are some guidelines for the type of system setup
that works best for video capturing. By understanding these guidelines,
you should be able to optimize your machine and alter your capturing
technique to achieve the best captures possible.
Getting the right hardware
There are three key components to capturing video that account for much
of the demand on a system's resources. They are the video capture
board, the CPU, and the hard drive. Each are equally important and a
bottleneck in any one will adversely affect the performance of the others.
The video capture board converts the original analog video source into
digital data. In general, the faster this board is, the faster video can be
digitized and then used by your computer. While the video capture board
handles video input, it is the CPU which handles the delivery. The faster
the CPU is, the more video (as data) can be processed and thus the better
captured video file.
Once video has been processed by the CPU, it is written to your hard
drive. Most hard drives can only read and write data at approximately
600-1200 KB per second. If you try capturing full frame (640x480) full
motion (30 or 25 frames per second) video (approximately 30-25 MB per
second uncompressed respectively), then it is highly unlikely that your
hard drive can keep up and your computer would end up dropping (skip-
ping) frames. For serious users, the best hard drive to get is an AV drive
(audio/video) which is designed for the demands of video capturing and
can handle up to 2-3 MB per second.
Note:
If you have a DV camcorder, you will need to use a capture board having
FireWire (or IEEE-1394) interface. DV capture boards provide automatic device
control over the source and "lossless" transfer of video data between the tape and
your hard drive.