Capture DV fire wire workflow advice
 

I am a beginner desiring help please.
Goal; is to design work flow to capture from Canon Gl-2 directly (in real time 2 hours in length) by PC / capture card. Capture format MPEG-2 (no editing required as defined by articles I have read dF).
The Desired Capture quality excellent.
MPEG-2 files will have multiple functions:
1 - for projector and flat screens,
2 - for YouTube streaming. YouTube format I am not clear on. Each file will be two hours in length. How does this affect my format choses?
My Canon GL-2 camera has DV, and S-Video out. Which world serves me best?
I have read that ATI and NLE storm might be good chooses?
I have the camera, old PC’s XP / 1 with 1 x AGP 8x, another i5 PC win7 with nothing to do your thoughts are very welcome
Thank you
Mark

Welcome to the site. :)

This will really only look good if it's from a tripod-mounted camera. Given the tethered required, I'll assuming that's the plan anyway.

You only have two real options:
(1) a hardware MPEG capture card or capture stick
(2) or one of the suggested ATI capture cards

Does this have to be compressed DVD-Video compliant video? Or better Blu-ray compliant? Or yet-higher broadcast grade? DVD-Video caps bitrate at 9.8Mbps. Blu-ray caps at 15Mbps. Broadcast is in the 15Mbps to 50Mbps range, averaging at 20-25. The more bitrate, the better it's going to look, and the better it will work as a near-lossless format.

Without a special (expensive!) network appliance, you'll need to encode for Youtube separately, non-realtime. While you can probably try to upload large MPEG-2 files to Youtube, you'd do much better to provide it a stream that falls within Youtube's H.264 encoding parameters. 640x480 MP$ H.264 @ 3Mbps works fine. If this is professional use, I'd suggest the MainConcept Reference Encoder, not a freeware. Don't use some silly $30-50 "converter" program (cheap Chinese junk).

For this project, s-video.

ATI, yes.

The Canopus DVstorm is outdated, Windows XP only, with specific older/unsupported (hard-to-find) versions of Premiere only. I would not buy a DVstorm at this point in time. I'd have a hard time using it even if it was given to me for free.

One of those should work fine. What is the CPU model and CPU speed on the older XP AGP system? It needs to be at least 1.8Ghz Intel P4 non-Celeron. Maybe an AMD systems, depending on the exact model of motherboard (no VIA motherboards!).

Hello and thank you!
You are correct the GL2 is tripod mounted.
I have chosen the hardware MPEG capture option, using ATI 7500 AGP (found several new).
The PC
Mother board:
Asus A7V8X North Bridge: VIA®: KT400 South Bridge: VIA®: VT8235 Socket A for AMD®: Athlon XP/ Athlon/ Duron up to 2.4GHz
CPU:
AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (MHz)
1-G ram
450 watt power supply
Win XP SP2
DirectX 9c

Installing software for the 7500 has me confused. Should I install MMC 8.7 for this card?
Install these?
ATI-6168package-1st-wdm.rar
ATI-6168package-2nd-wme.rar
ATI-6168package-3rd-cp.rar
ATI-6168package-4th-mdacdao.part1.rar
ATI-6168package-4th-mdacdao.part2.rar
ATI-6168package-4th-mdacdao.part3.rar

Notice 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th -- the install MUST be in that order! ... followed by the ATI MMC 8.7 on that page.

ATI-MMC-87.part1.rar
ATI-MMC-87.part2.rar
ATI-MMC-87.part3.rar
ATI-MMC-87.part4.rar

Is the correct?
Thank you
Mark

You'll want to use ATI MMC for MPEG capturing, yes.
ATI MMC would be consider the 5th item to install, after all four steps of the 6168 package gets installed.

I'm a bit unsure about that specific motherboard and CPU for use with ATI hardware. VIA motherboards of the era were notoriously finicky and problem-prone, and the Athlon 1800+ is about 1.5Ghz in actual processing power. It's one the low end, so you'll really need to watch for dropped frames. I had an ATI 128 Pro card in a system with near-identical specs, and it wasn't so hot at recording. The motherboard had something unshielded on it, too, which would cause noise patterns on the video preview and captures. Watch for this. You may have issues, or you may not. Just be prepared for it. Ideally you want to use Intel CPUs and non-VIA motherboards on the older configurations.

Thank you
Do you have specific specifications for a capture box using ATI 775 you could share?
Or is the general idea:
P4 – socket 478 or LGA 775,
Northwood, Prescott, or Cedar Mill?
1.8 to 2.8 MHz single core non Celeron.
Not VIA chip motherboard
AGP 4X / 8X
Memory 2 gigabits.
Multiple Hard drives

If you where to pick your dream machine for capture what would you consider?
Mark