At the moment we are using SWP together with a Logitech 4000 Pro webcam.

Is there any recomendation about using a capture card together with a video camera instead of using a webcam?
Would this provide better performance when the CPU/memory of the PC is limited or would this not make any difference? Are there any other reasons to use a real video camera instead of a USB webcam?

Thanks

Hello Jan,

A video capture card does indeed help performance. Both the Osprey and the Winnov cards work well for encoding video.

A benefit of using a camera and a capture card is that you have a backup to put it in a different format if you wish. (Both Real and Windows Media).

It is important to note that we issued an update for the osprey cards on v5.6. You'll need to have v5.6 to use the osprey cards.

In a future version of SW (I can't say when it will be released), we have reduced the CPU usage by about 70% and also the memory usage...

But for now, I would go the osprey/winnov route.

Thanks,
OPTX Support

I forgot one other point. You don't want to use firewire or a firewire card. It is very CPU intensive. So stay with an analog capture device.

Thanks,
OPTX Support