Hey everyone, I can offer my take on this if anyone still needs advice and some updated information. I have done quite a bit of video editing (both SD and HD) and even made a few available on this site (check out Fan-made video section under my user name "skytoast" - some Soul Calibur machinima shorts).
I've started with SD but then eventually made the (somewhat painful) transition to HD. Most of the consumer enthusiast video capturing solutions I've worked with did an OK job. These were usually external firewire capturing devices but due to the speed in which they capture, they are only capable of SD. I've also noticed a lot of them usually lagged behind the real time feed so required an external monitor for realtime monitoring. Also when you're dealing with SD, you're usually working with specific pixel aspect ratios due to the nature of SD television/video formats NTSC, PAL/SECAM DV/DV1 Standard/Widescreen/Anamorphic, 4:3, 16:9 & their derivatives, interlace/progressive formats. Converting from one format to the other usually resulted in varying degrees of quality, because of the differences between these formats (unless you started with a progressive format). HD, in my opinion, is much more refined and uniform to work with. But it has its caveats.
If you got the resources, money, equipment, & time, definitely go HD. With the technology being more and more prevalent and widespread (HDTVs getting cheaper and being everywhere), going the HD route is the better, smarter, and lasting choice. With that said, here's what I would recommend as an ideal setup for video editing along with some related details:
Capture card:
Blackmagic Intensity Pro Current MSRP Price ($199USD)
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/
Yeah you read that right. The card is now only $199. This is the price now for the "Pro" version and not the standard Intensity which has now been discontinued (Standard version doesn't have breakout port/cables, only HDMI in/out). I paid about $350 about a year ago for this card. It's a relatively affordable card that does a tremendous job capturing all your gaming creativity. It has 2 HDMI ports (1 input/ 1 output) and a breakout cable/dongle with connections for Component, Composite and S-video - inputs / outputs. It can handle everything from 525 NTSC / 625 PAL SD to 720p HD up to 1080i HD. (Note however, it does not natively capture 480p since that isnt technically a HD video standard so grabbing things off your Wii may require some other workaround.) It's a PCI-Express x1 card thats compatible with both Macs & PCs. However you are going to need some specific minimum requirements to run this smoothly.
Computer Setup
Having a multicore CPU is ideal (Dual or Quad core a must for HD). Throw in as much memory RAM you can. Be aware that if you're using a 32bit O/S like Win XP or Vista 32, you are limited to only 4GB (~3.5 GB) so if you can go 64bit with either XP 64, Vista 64 or OSX Leopard (Macs) defintely do so. A 64bit O/S will allow you to use more memory. Get lots of storage space and I dont mean a single large hard drive. Having a dedicated drive for just video editing is ideal. At the time of this writing, 1TB hard drives can be had for less than $100. Faster the better (7200rpm - 10,000rpm +). Most of the video files that you download off the web to playback on your computer (even the really large ones) have already been encoded (compressed) so it only takes a small amount of space. When you're capturing uncompressed SD or HD video, the raw file (some of which is only a few secs to a few min long) can amount to GBs in data. But I'll talk more about that in a bit. If you are going to do HD, you'll need a hard disk array also known as striped RAID setup (RAID 0 - thats where you take 2 hard drives {identical} and essentially hook them up in parallel so they act as one big drive. Most motherboards today have this feature onboard and can easily be set up in the bios). The reason for this is because the fastest commercial hard drives (10,000rpm) arent fast enough to keep up with large data stream from capturing HD video. Having 2 drives connected in parallel essentially increases the speed by being able to read/write from both drive platters at the same time. The drawback in RAID 0 however is if one drive fails, then you're screwed since you'll only have half or parts of the data. If you want to counteract this problem, either backup frequently or build a Stripe + Mirror array RAID by having 4 drives tied together. That way, you'll get performance plus redundancy by duplicating or "mirroring" the data across multiple disks. The last bit in terms of computer hardware is to have a decent graphics card -any mainstream/professional Nvidia/AMD(ATI) solution for general video editing will do {but onboard video or integrated graphics like you find in most laptops may not do so well} and a good monitor(s) with plenty of viewing real estate.
Editing Software
Now if you're gonna just capture video for archival purposes then you probably wont need more than whats included in the box. But if you plan on making something presentable, then you'll need some kind of video editing software or NLE (Non Linear Editing) suite of your choice such as
Adobe Premiere/After Effects, Sony Vegas, Final Cut Studio, Avid, etc etc. I use
Adobe Premiere CS3 (and now
CS4 since they updated all drivers that work with it finally). Most of these professional NLEs may be a bit pricey costing hundreds to over a thousand dollars or so but a lot of these companies also provide consumer level or stripped down versions of their professional editing suites such as
Adobe Premiere Elements or
Final Cut Express. There are also free solutions such as
Virtualdub or even O/S bundled apps like
Windows Movie Maker or
iMovie that maybe helpful too.
For Adobe Premiere, the Intensity Pro card will install presets when you startup a new project so getting started is a snap. Capturing video is done directly through Premiere's interface and then its just a matter of dragging dropping clips into the timeline, editing the sequence, scrub for preview and all that fun stuff.
HD Resources
Now getting back to what I said about HD requiring massive resources, yes its going to need some hefty amount. The average size for few minutes of uncompressed HD stream at 1280x720p amounts to GBs in size. Yeah, I said
Gigabytes! (HD @ 8bit 1280x720 59.94fps ~= 105MB/sec or 370GB/hr) A small 18 second clip of uncompressed HD video will be about 1.89GB when your done. Now you're probably scratching your heads and thinking WTF? How am I going to work with that? Well editing the raw part is easy (as long as your computer can handle it) but storing and creating the final master for distribution is another task. Thats where encoding comes in.
Encoding
Encoding is simply a form of compression algorithim that takes this whopping uncompressed raw data stream and turn it into something more palatable, err well more portable, storable, and useable. But it comes in all forms and flavors also known as a codec. There are video codecs and audio codecs. MP3 or "MPEG-1 Layer 3" is an audio codec which is a form of compression to its uncompressed larger digital counterpart, most commonly a PCM file either a *.wav or *.aiff sound format. With most compression algorithims, there's always a bit of loss in data/quality. It's still acceptable to a certain degree depending on the user's taste but the tradeoff is you're saving a lot more space. There are lots of codecs to choose from that range in quality, performance, compression size, and price. I'm not going to go into an encoding discussion in this post because that could fill several posts in a thread all by itself. But I will mention there a lot of free codecs floating around on the web that may do the job for most of you. The Intensity Pro is packaged with the MJPEG codec which can be used to capture HD streams in real time. This may just be enough for some of you to use to later re-encode it to something else more suitable for your needs (divx,xvid,h264,wmv, etc). I personally dont like using it because compared to uncompressed at full resolution, the video picture are too jaggy (because its "too sharp") requiring some kind antialiasing to soften the picture in post production or reformat the video to smaller resolution.
If you want the best and dont want to compromise the beauty and elegance of uncompressed HD without taking up all that space, then there's hope: the Cineform Intermediate Digital Master realtime codec/plugin.
Cineform
http://www.cineform.com
This is the best codec hands down that I have ever used. To the human eye, it is indistinguishable to uncompressed. It cuts the size to about a third of what would be required in uncompressed HD at full resolution. So that 18 sec 1.8Gb file cuts down to about 350-400Mb (megabytes). It translates well to other formats and given it's size, its great to use as a digital master for archival purposes. It integrates with most NLEs, fully supports Blackmagic cards and processes the encoding in real time while capturing your video.
But all this comes at a cost, and for most of you probably more than your willing to spend. The cost for the codec alone could probably buy you a brand new computer depending on which solution you get. The current price at the time of this post is about ($499USD - $1499USD). For your HD gaming capture needs, the solutions are PC: Cineform NeoHD/4K (PC version) or ProspectHD/Prospect4K. Mac: NeoHD/4K (Mac version). The difference between these versions is the inclusion of real time editing engines and integration into Premiere/Final Cut. The plain vanilla NeoHD will allow you to capture video but when you import to Premiere, you'll have to scrub & process render for all effects/tweaks, transitions etc. ProspectHD/4K on the other hand handles these effects in real time with full integration with no pre-rendering. They also include project and effects presets within Premiere. Cineform does offer another cheaper consumer suite called NeoScene ($129USD) but is only capable (locked) of converting HDV/AVCHD formats popular on HD camcorders to Cineform so wont do you much good if you're trying to capture/convert raw SD/HD video feeds from a game console. The price for most of these has come down a bit compared to what I paid for when I got the ProspectHD license (which was nearly a thousand dollars).
Dude, that's too much $$$?
Yeah, it isn't cheap but it depends on how serious you are about making videos. It wont make any financial sense if you just plan to casually capture a few rounds with your friends just so you can broadcast it over the web. Besides all that awesome High Definition quaility will be lost in translation when you take your final output master and encoded it to a format for the web (h264 mp4, wmv, etc) only to have Youtube (SD or HD) re-encode that encoding even further after you upload it. So a lot is lost by the time all your friends on your buddy list sees it. (It'll still look great as long as you encode it right but pales in comparison to the original master). For the most part, you never really see uncompressed quality in any commercial distribution, whether HD or SD. It just isn't practical. Even Blue-Ray discs sport a form of video compression even though it still looks absolutely fantastic on that 120-240hz Sony Bravia your neighbor has. So unless you do this for a living, decide to get into serious amateur/semi pro video editing/movie making as a hobby, or just a hardcore videophile nutcase who wants nothing but the best digital masters to keep for an eternity, then you'll have to justify the costs.
Blackmagic Intensity Pro + Cineform Workflow
When I make gaming videos, my workflow is similar to Jaxel's setup above except I dont use a signal splitter from the PS3 (or Xbox 360/other). I can monitor real time feeds from the preview window of the software or by plugging an external monitor (HDTV) to the output end of the Blackmagic Intensity Pro Card (HDMI or Component out). This is just fine since I'm only capturing footage for my personal needs and not running any tournaments that may require a large dedicated screen. The card captures in real time and I havent noticed any real lag so you should be able to utilize the output even for live events. The main video signal from the console is fed to Intensity where I capture via Cineform's HDlink software under Prospect HD then I compile all that footage to CS3/CS4 Premiere/After Effects for realtime editing/post production. CS4 Suite integrates another standalone app - Adobe Media Encoder which handles all my distribution needs, easily encoding Cineform media to the web, my ipod, dvd or blue ray disc. It's a similar workflow when I work with Vegas or Final Cut Pro on Macs dependent on the project.
::PS3/360/HDCam --> Intensity Pro ----> Computer (PC/Mac) Cineform capture real time ---> NLE Post Production/Final output
::::::::::::::::::::::::: Intensity Pro HDMI Component out ----> HDTV
My personal setup
In case any of you want to know, my current setup at home is an Intel Core i7 (Quad core with 8 threads (4 cores/4 virtual cores {Hyperthreaded}), 12GB RAM, running Vista 64 Ultimate, a total of 6 TB (Terabytes) hard drive space { 1x1TB dedicated for OS/apps system drive, 1x1TB for cache/scratch disk & misc storage, 2x1TB RAID 0 dedicated for video capturing, 1x1TB drive for other apps, games etc, 1x1TB for backup storage), a Nvidia GTX 260 video card, Blackmagic Intensity Pro, Lite-on Blue Ray burner, and a 850w power supply powering this rig. I also have a Mac and access to a few workstations at work with different setups.
It handles HD video editing and cuts through most of the tasks like butter (well almost, when everything else goes well). And yes, it can play Crysis too.
I hope this information is helpful.
