CompuServe Thread

Sorry for not checking my mail sooner. Yes the TrueVision card uses the EISA bus slot. The EISA bus is still around, especially in the world of Pentium file servers. However, as Truevision dealers we've been promised a VLB version sometime this year. The real problem with all the capture cards is getting the data stream to match that of the BUS and the HDrive. The drives that have high burst rates don't always have high enough sustained rates. The EISA bus standard has the "promised" thoughput of 10MB per second (sustained). Seeing is believing. I was surprised to find that the VL bus slots on the motherboard of my fine tuned 486DX2-66 could only punch though 416k/sec. of sustained data transfer. Although it could burst up to 8.9MB per second, once the buffer was full, it would choke. The cards with the most VRAM buffer seen to have over come the bottle neck at the bus. The Truevision 2000 card has 4MB stock, I think. None of the cheap cards from Aitech and SB/Creative Labs have what it takes to do a sustained capture. So the choices are slim on the PC platform. One thing that I found was the best to do with the MIRO DC1 card I have; was to put it on a dedicated computer. That way I didn't have any conflicts with the image capture board fighting for CPU time. I have some spec's on the Indeo card from Intel, but I haven't purchase one to see if it will work properly with Adobe Premier. I think the real way to deal with the problem is to make the image capture device plug directly to the Enhanced IDE adapter located on some of the new motherboards. That way less data would be lost because the adapter is in the MotherBoard. So much for Pipe dreams. Bill Kolstad CAD and Supply FAX (619) 868-2102