Video capture basics

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I am about to buy a Mac Pro in the next few months and have a few questions about video capture. I have some analogue video on VHS tapes, and some mini DV tapes with and camcorder. I believe the DV cam can be used as a convertor analogue in to digital video out through the Firewire.

I have seen some devices such as TVMax
TVMax - Digital Video Recorder for Mac
which does the conversion from analogue to digital DivX or MPEG4 in realtime before sending the digital data to the Mac. It seems to be USB 2.0

Now, the question, what is the best way to transfer all this video to the Mac? use this external TVMax device and USB into the MAC, or use the camcorder as a convertor to a firewire signal and do the capture/conversion on the Mac.

The TVMax is sendding DivX or MPEG4 to the Mac, but what about the camcorder and the firewire? I imagine that signal will need to be converted by the Mac. I would have expected the hardware conversion using the TVMax box to be more efficient as it is taking some of the processing away from the Mac? but what about quality?

Can anyone explain what the best method is. I have seen a few other threads about this, but nothing that seems to answer what I am asking

Neil
 

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