capture card prob

[sainath]

Hello friends

I am new in this editing field. Just want to know more abt grabbing card. One of my friend is using Avid for editing. He is using breakout box which has come along with software. It is connected through USB to pc. I am using primer pro 1.5 on my laptop with normal capture card.
Now problem is that quality of Videos edited on both machine is almost same. Than why to spend so much on card/software. I am bit confuse. Can any one explain me work of expensive capturing cards

 

[MarkG]

For DV, there's not much point in using expensive capture cards these days. Back when people were editing on a P2-300, the card could do realtime effects that the CPU couldn't cope with, but today the PC is so much faster that it can do more realtime effects than most people would ever use.

As I understand it the main benefit of the Avid Mojo (if that's what they're using) is that you can do analogue video input and output, rather than just Firewire. So you can capture Beta SP or other formats into your editing system as well as DV, and you can output your edited video to be displayed on a TV as you're editing and color grading.