One of the main points of building the Perfect PC is to create a machine that will enable us to handle digital and analogue video editing. It is therefore worth spending some effort on the hardware and software that will be doing the heavy lifting of pixel maniputlation.
There are specialized rigs that effortlessly deal with video, but we are going to stick with cards and software that fit in our PC. The three main vendors appear to be Maxtor, Pinnacle, and Canopus.
Product reviews indicate a constant leap-frogging of features and performance among the vendors. Distilling all the features down is non-trivial. An excellent review ended up with a matrix of many hundreds of points of comparison.
Now it becomes a matter of how much money you want to spend. Since our design philosophy is to spend as little as possible for the maximum performance, we are going to have to keep our aspirations in check and give a miss to the top of the line. If you were actually doing editing full time, the investment would be worth it, but we are just producing home movies for the moment.
The Canopus DV Raptor-RT is the successor to the original DV Raptor. It is stable, fast, and works with the Sony mini-DV camera it is going to be pared with, through an on-board IEEE 1394 port.
Their cards take advantage of whatever CPU and memory are available on the PC, rather than being stand alone specialized processors.
Given the steep cost and performance curves for CPU's and memory, that design philosophy is the best bet to take, avoiding the need to replace the card every year.
