[J.J.]

Originally posted by Thoran: the biggest problem you'll have with your rig is going to be getting a decent quality cap. Unless you spend a lot on a dedicated card you'll be limited to less than 320x200 at 20-30 fps (possibly less). If that quality is ok then all I'd suggest is not to bother with premeire, get one of the less expensive editing packages. I run Premiere on a liquid cooled Athlon XP 2000+ with a gig of DDR333, a firewire interface to a JVC GR-DVM50U Cybercam, and a DVD+RW... I can get to 640x480, but I have trouble getting a full 30fps capture. I'm unfamiliar with the USB based device, but you need to keep in mind that a 320x200 x 24bit Color x 30fps image is about 6 megabytes/s of uncompressed data... USB will not transfer at even this rate (limited to about 1.5MB/s unless it's USB version 2.0 - which is still rare) and I doubt and inexpensive device is capable of encoding the stream on the fly. 640x480 x 24bit Color x 30fps is almost 40 megabytes/s... most hard drives will barf on this stream and I have to encode it on the fly to run it at all. SO... if you can keep the frame size small you should be able to do it with an inexpensive capture card and the software that comes with it... if you want enough quality to justify Premeire or some other high end editing software then IMO you should spend the cash and get a box capable of doing decent work.

Thoran, thanks for the info, but I am afraid that I am unfamiliar with the value x value x fps ratio. I do know that broadcast quality (400 lines per inch) is wya out of my reach now, but what I need to accomplish is to take the vhs dub I get from our production dept. and play/convert it to a digital format - I have several cd and dvd copying programs that I collected off the net that purport to do this and convert to mpeg2 or 4 format. all I need is to make a cdrom with my client's commercial on it in a format that their office computer with a cdrom drive can play. hopefully, something that windows media can play, since I don't want to have to mess around with them having to sownload flash player or some other video/media player plug-in.

with an 80g HD as storage and only 30 or 60 second length of video to convert at any one time, space is not one of my worries (right?) - just getting their spot on a disc so they can look at it right then and there, and not having to leave a tape behind, then calling to ask "have you watched it yet? have you watched it yet?"

with that in mind, and my puny processor, do you think i can do it, and what do i need to do it? - btw, sorry, NOT digital out on my vcr. I wonder if i could hook up my vcr as input to my digital cable box, then would I have a digital out signal if I hooked up to the digital outs that thing DOES have?? ever hear of anyone trying that? - I don't know how or what I could hook up to the dig outs on my cable box to see if it was actually doing it, but that is why you have a set-top converter box in your house when you get digital cable - is that not just one big a to d converter, kinda like that dazzle box???

......darn it, every answer leads to three more q's...