Straight to video Working with moving pictures is now feasible on the most basic home or business PC, thanks to today's powerful processors.
Video editing is one of the last technologies to gain acceptance as a mainstream PC application.
In the past, digital video work was limited to a small group of specialist users, such as multimedia developers and professional video editors, who were prepared to pay for expensive and complex digital video systems. These cards perform two distinct tasks. However, raw digital video files are enormous, so the card needs to provide additional compression hardware to reduce the data to a file size that's easier to handle. This compression hardware does all the real work, so that the PC's processor merely has to transfer the incoming video data into RAM or straight onto the hard disk. It was the cost of the compression hardware that made these cards so expensive.