Article Focus: Several months ago, Jim Harvey needed to acquire a small DV deck that had the capability of handling both mini-DV and full-sized DV cassettes. Having used JVC products in the past, Jim narrowed his choices to either the BR-DV6000 or the BR-DV3000. He decided on the DV-3000 and was so disappointed -- even after numerous attempts to work through issues with JVC's service department -- that he wanted to share his experiences with other COW members. Normally, we do not usually run stories or reviews of this nature but we've followed this story and have seen Jim attempt every possible solution in our opinion. So, we felt this review is accurate, if only in Jim's experience and some others we have seen with similar BR-DV3000 stories here at Creative Cow.
Several months ago, I found myself needing to acquire a small DV deck that had the capability of handling both Mini-DV and full size DV cassettes. While all of the work that I produce is shot on Mini DV, I do encounter situations where the full size cassette comes across my desk, or a client requests their project to be put on large cassette. I used to just bring the work to a duplicator and have them transfer the projects to the large cassettes, but as that was time consuming and inefficient, I opted to have a multi-use deck available to me.
I have always liked JVC products. I think that they are a high quality product and an innovative company. Having DV-500 cameras in house made it an easy decision to go with the JVC deck. After all, there would be zero compatibility issues using equipment from the same manufacturer.
I had a couple of choices, either the DV-6000 or the DV-3000. As I had no need for the view screen on the 600, the 3000 was the unit that I chose. It was priced just right and had the featured that I was looking for.
I liked the design of the deck immediately. A small footprint, the ability to accept both large and small cassettes, firewire in and out, RCA and S-Video connections was really all that I needed.
It seemed to interface quite well with my editing program (Vegas). However, it soon became clear that the deck had a hard time being utilized with deck control. Capture issues (not seeing the deck, missing timecode start points on a regular basis) are an everyday occurrence. Just to be sure, I switched over to Adobe Premier, just to see if there was something in Vegas that the deck didn’t like. Unfortunately, the problems were evident in Premier as well. Changing over to a Sony deck, all the problems with device control vanished. Despite these problems, when the deck worked, it seemed to work quite well that is until I watched the capture and playback. I immediately noticed that I was experiencing dropouts and was getting head cleaning warnings every other tape. Now let me say here, I ONLY use MQ tapes in my cameras and stipulate on all outside work that the projects be shot on MQ tape as well.
My first thought was to check the cameras. Never in my wildest dreams would I have looked at the deck. In hindsight, obviously that was a mistake. After all, the only link in the chain that was different was the DV-3000 deck. Up until this point, I had not had a drop out in so long that when I saw it on playback, I couldn’t believe it. I went back to the timeline and scrolled slowly through the footage and lo and behold, there it was!
At this point, the smart thing to do would have been to check the master tape. But I was NOT smart and blamed the camera. A quick cleaning and I was confident that my dropouts would be gone. I shot some test footage and popped it into the 3000 to check on a monitor. About 30 second's into the tape the “Head Cleaning Required” message appeared onscreen. Okay, what’s this? A 5 second pass with a cleaning tape and try again. (Now this seemed a little suspicious as the deck at this point had about 50 hours on it. Yes, I know everyone says clean your heads every 50 hours, but right on the nose?).
Continuing with my test footage, I still found dropouts. I shot some additional footage with a DV-500 camera and yes, there they were, more drop outs on a single clip than I had seen in the cumulative shooting of the past 6 months. Obviously it was time to send the Camera in for service. I brought the camera in to our tech for a thorough cleaning, which lost me the unit for a couple of days. Getting it back and repeating the experiment, to my horror, there were the dropouts again. A slew of them, a veritable carnival of dropouts blinking back at me like some digital virus that the ointment didn’t cure.
I sent the camera back to service with a note to change the heads on the camera (500 hours on the heads at this point, roughly _ of the number that you would expect to have before even thinking of doing a head change). The tech checked the camera and pronounced it fine; having argued with me that the original heads were fine and the problem was somewhere else (make a note: LISTEN TO YOUR TECH!). Nonetheless, I had the heads changed
Now, armed with a basically brand new camera, I was confident that my problems were completely behind me. What a rude shock to see those nasty little glitches in the first 5 minutes of playback. Hey wait a minute! Playing back the same clip twice, I realized that the drop out had somehow moved! But that’s impossible isn’t it? Okay, I take a 5-minute clip and digitize it. Now I go back and recapture the same clip. Put them on the timeline and do a split screen comparison. Whoa! Track A has a drop out at 2:57:05 while Track B has perfect video. Track B has a drop out at 3:12:18 while Track A is playing clean clear video! IT’S THE DECK!
Another annoying and totally un-acceptable problem is the horizontal banding type of dropout (or “glitch” if you prefer) that is usually indicative of a dirty head. With the frequency that this deck asks for head cleaning you would think that you would NEVER see horizontal banding. Not so. This deck puts so many of these dropouts on tape that you’d think you were working in a Venetian blind factory! After having the unit professionally gone over by JVC themselves, the first problem that manifested itself was the banding. I’m a pretty laid back guy, but that came close to me wanting to see if I could make the little JVC fly. Better sense prevailed and I dropped in a cleaning tape (this after 4 minutes of use after the return from JVC service).
fig.1 Capture of the same segment of footage shows drop out in one captured
Segment (right side clip) while the other clip shows perfect video. This horizontal banding is usually indicative of dirty heads. Classic “drop-outs” also manifest themselves frequently.
I returned the deck to my dealer who sent it to JVC for a thorough check out. To JVC’s Credit, the deck came back in about a week (we are located very close to the N.J. facility). The note on the R/O indicated that the unit had a” Clogged V. head, error rate adjustment, Rewriting program”. Okay, there was evidently some bit of gunk or crud in the head, the error rate adjustment needed to be tweaked and JVC found it and fixed it. Great! … NO NOT GREAT. After only 5 hours of use, all the symptoms came back. The drop out rate on any given tape is simply unacceptable. I have taken the same footage directly from the camera with ZERO drop-outs and then played it through the deck with 3 or 4 drop-outs in a 3 minute span.
I have had people argue that dropouts are inevitable when you shoot DV/Mini DV. Certainly they are ubiquitous when watching broadcast and cable TV News. But I don’t accept that. If the drop out isn’t on the master tape, it darn well shouldn’t be there when I bring it in for editing. If the equipment isn’t reliable, then I have a real problem. If the deck introduces dropouts and artifacts that are not present in the master then the deck is basically useless.
It’s a shame really. I really liked the compact design of the unit. I liked the ease of programming (with a small gripe about one or two things kind of “hidden” away in the menu system). I liked the small amount of space it occupied on my desk, and I even liked the overall appearance of the unit; black, very professional looking. But alas, the performance of the JVC GR-DV3000U is simply not up to even casual use.
Having written this, I wondered if it was only my deck that was having these problems. I did a search on several sites and found a great deal of complaining about this particular unit. Some were complaints about the audio (I never had a seconds worth of audio problems with the deck). Others were about dropouts and poor performance. The deck has been out for a little over a year now, so many of the New User reviews are archived away. I also queried some people I know who have the deck and was disappointed to find that they too had experienced problems with this unit. In a professional environment, you simply can’t afford to have a piece of equipment that you don’t have total confidence in. I am sure that there are many people who are quite satisfied with the performance on their DV-3000 decks. Maybe they have units that have no problems, maybe they attribute whatever problems they have to other pieces of gear, maybe they believe that you can’t shoot DV without getting drop outs, I don’t know. I DO know that I can’t rely on this deck and would not recommend it to anyone who needs to have clean, quality performance from his or her deck.
-- Jim Harvey
COW Rating: The GR-DV3000U is a big let-down from my perspective. JVC has stated that the issues with this unit have been resolved but from my experience, along with the experience of some others I have spoken with who have used this deck, there are still some serious issues that have not been resolved -- at least not to my satisfaction as a customer. For close to $2000 (US$) including tax, there is no excuse for this unit to not function without the issues addressed in this article.
1 Cow rating, only because Creative Cow's management would not let me give it zero Cows. I can’t recommend something that has proven to be so problematic.
-- one cow out of a possible five.
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-- one cow out of a possible five.
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