Oh, wait, and I love these:

"I very much doubt that any real-time capture cards are future-proof, they're all redundant."

Again, displaying your total lack of knowledge about the Storm card. (You like that word "redundant too", don't you? Don't see how it applies here.) Will the Storm still be around in 20, or even 10, years? Probably not, but it has been around for three years and is still blowing the other boards out of the water, without any need for a hardware upgrade. The same can't be said for any other card out there.

"I can do real-time capture from a pro VidCam through the firewire on my laptop without dropping frames!"

**[SARCASM FILTER OFF]**Oooooooo ... gosh golly, stop the presses! WOW, you mean you can actually capture something WITHOUT dropping frames?!?! That's FREAKIN' AMAZING!!! My God, what an idiot I've been all these years, I didn't know this was even possible! How can it do that??? [SARCASM FILTER ON] i.e., I would certainly hope so. If this were circa 1996 (e.g. an eon ago in digital video editing) I might be impressed I suppose.

"Let me give you a clue about the re-rendering thing: you have a series of frames saved with non-standard compression, you have a series of frames saved with a standard compression: which takes the longest to render into a standard compression format? Would you like a clue?"

You can't go handing out clues, when you haven't got one. DV by its very nature is a compressed format ... it's in the FREAKING STANDARD. SHEEESH!!! 3.5MB/s to be exact, and Canopus's is no different. Why do I need to re-render it into a "standard" compression format?? In exactly what situation would I EVER need to do this? If I need to get the edited footage to someone else I simply output the timeline (IN REALTIME with all filters/effects/titles, etc) right back out to the DV deck. Love to see a plain ol' firewire card do that, now that WOULD be impressive.

I DO think that is going to happen as machines get faster and faster. We're already seeing realtime playback of some effects on some machines in Final Cut and Premiere Pro, and if you're machine is really fast you can even get some realtime DV output.

Cheers,
Tim