Jean,
Since it’s been over a year since I last bought a video card, I’m not up on the current models. But ATI and nvidia have always been good cards. You should probably get a card that plugs into a PCI-Express slot in your computer. I’m using an ATI with 256MB, but then I’m only doing standard def. Since you mentioned HDMI, I assume you’re gearing up for high def. Probably 512MB would be good for that. For an HDMI port, I think you need to get a special interface card from BlackMagicDesign or AJA (in addition to your regular video card).
Other things to consider for high def are plenty of system RAM (many recommend 2 MB, some say 4MB for optimal performance), a separate hard drive for the video files (some say to get a RAID array of hard drives to handle the high bandwidth, but I think that’s mostly for capturing HDMI high def directly from the camera to the computer).
Good luck,
Ken Hull
