General Problems

I'm dropping frames when capturing via firewire! Help!
The data rate is less than the required rate of 4444 Kbyte/second
Defragment your hard drive. If the disk has to continuously seek, the data rate wil fall and you'll start to loose chunks of data - i.e drop frames. otherwise it's time to invest in a better hard drive.

I've got a DV camera and capturing via the supplied USB cable, but the quality is very poor?
Your USB port is a 1.1, the data rate of USB 1.1 isn't sufficient to transfer digital video. You need to use the DV (firewire/ilink) connection to get better quality.

How should I capture? DV, USB, or S-video?
Capturing via DV is a lossless process - the video transferred from your camcorder is an identical copy of the original. This is possible due to Firewire permitting fast data transfer rates - faster than the rates USB allows. If you capture via S-video (or indeed USB), you'll necesarily see a reduction in the quality of your captured video, so always opt for the DV option if available

A firewire connection also enables remote control of camcorder functions via the PC.

Video won't play in my DVD player!
First off, you'll need to create either a VCD (or variant) or DVD to play in in a standalone DVD player. Not all players are happy with VCDs and then there's compatability problems with the discs themselves.

What capture card should I buy?
A Firewire card is the way to gol. A standard firewire card combined with video capture software, will enable DV capture from your camcorder.
If you do want to edit your video, you can pick up a cheap video editing suite such as Ulead Video Studio

Some manufacturers bundle a standard firewire card with video editing software and call it a video editing card. These usually retail for less than $100/£100. Because the cards don't offer any hardware acceleration, you'll want to make sure you get the best bundled software.

My captured video is enormous?
Yes. DV has a data rate of 3.5MB/sec, so mulitply this by the number of seconds in your video and you have the video size in MB.

What should I use to make my video size smaller?
You need to compress your video. This will inevitably reduce the quality of your video depending on the amount of compression used. If you compress you video, you will never be able to get back to the original quality.