Three major vendors of different strategies for capture are AJA, Pinnacle and BlackMagic.

AJA is an established vendor of video products and has been producing Apple compatible capture cards since 1998 when they first announced the AJA Kona SD and HD cards for the new then G4 computers. Today Apple has been working closely with AJA to perfect SD capture over Firewire with the I/O and subsequent IOLA and IOLD products that connect via Firewire to your Final Cut Pro Macintosh.  Shipping soon, the Kona 2 PCI-X video capture card that can acquire SDI –SD or HD uncompressed promises to make waves in the digital video community.

Pinnacle is a mostly PC video provider with one exception being the Cinewave capture PCI card. The Cinewave PCI card provides all the processing and effects within the card making it a viable product to do SD and HD with a slower computer. Since all the work is done by the PCI card, Final Cut Pro’s RT Extreme is not relevant to using the CPU as power for processing.

BlackMagic is a relatively new company with a long history of accomplishments. The BlackMagic team is comprised of folks who formerly worked at Digital Voodoo and their software team had provided the video codecs for AJA until recently.

Under the Decklink marketing name, BlackMagic provides extremely cost effective video capture PCI cards for all the formats.The latest products of interest are the Decklink Extreme which is a single PCI card to incorporate both analog and SDI digital capture.The current Decklink HD and soon to be shipping Decklink HD Pro are PCI-X cards that can capture either SDI-digital or HD uncompressed for Final Cut Pro.