I recently got me a JVC BR-DV3000 recorder, after hiring for two years a Sony dsr11.

It works reasonably fine, but when capturing after one or two tapes the timecode isnot read any more and the image in the preview appears as stripes. After cleaning the heads with a cleaningtape it works allright again.

But it seems to me that this not as it is supposed to be. With the DSR11 you never had to clean the heads as much.

I use this recorder in combination with G4 and FCP 4.


Anyone familiar with this problem?

I am familiar with this problem, but I don't have a solution for you exactly. The journalism school I attended bought four of these same-model JVC decks, and all of them started to have this dirty head malfunction only a few weeks after the A/V tech put them in the edit suites. They were all unreliable, and I saw one eat somebody's DVCAM tape - the deck had only seen a month of use at this point. The vendor that sold the decks to the school was no help, but I don't know whether they had any success with JVC tech support. I do know that all four of the decks were in worse condition after one month than the DSR-25s that had been there for two years and the DSR-11s that had been there for god knows how long. Since your is obviously faulty, if you have any chance to return or exchange it at this point then I suggest you do. Based on the four decks at the school, this will only get worse. Anyone have an opposite experience with this model?

Ough, that doesnot sound good.

On another discussion board (Apple support forum: http://discussions.info.apple.com, under FCP issues) i got the tip from somebody from SA Monica, CA, that the firmware can be updated by JVC. He got good experience with that.

I am trying now to get contact with JVC Europe.

Success with your four recs.