THE JVC GY-HD*** FIREWIRE FRY DILEMMA.

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robert Hart

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THE JVC GY-HD*** FIREWIRE FRY DILEMMA.

PostWed Jun 09, 2021 9:13 pm

I have posted over on dvinfo.net but given the JVC ProHD ecosystem is rather long in the tooth, there is a chance that a few folk who have long ago upgraded and migrated to this eocsystem may have some pearls of wisdom they can convey.

I am in the throes of recovering an oral history archive which was recorded in MiniDV and ProHD. The MiniDv stuff is dead easy with plenty of machines around still capable of playing back the tapes.

The JVC GY-HD*** camera family was a wonderful product when it came out but had its share of vulnerabilities. I don't think there were too many folk who disliked them if the cameras were survivors and working right.

One serious achilles heel was the vulnerablity of the firewire ports and internal circuits becoming destroyed either by intermittent connection due to a spread out plug anchorage in the camera or hostile currents interacting along the cable between two powered appliances.

Death duels between some cameras and some Mac computers were mentioned in forum posts. The camera firewire port was usually the loser.

My conundrum is that I have accumulated three failed cameras with good functioning tape transports. Two have surviving firewire ports. I have a firewire card in a computer which offers a choice of four pin and six pin plugs.

One of the hedges against frying the mainboard or the firewire port in the GY-HD***cameras was to interpose a short intermediate cable which had no continuity of the powered lines in the six pin cable to effectively isolate the powered circuits of both appliances.

I seek a bit of reassurance from longtime users of the cameras that using a cable which has a six pin connection on one end and a four pin connection on the other will achieve the same goal of isolating the power circuits of the computer and the camera.

The computer is capturing fine from both a Sony deck and a Sony camera. I am that little bit anxious that I may run out of JVC playback devices with functioning firewire ports. Like farmed turkeys, the JVCs firewire ports seemed to look for any excuse to up and die.

I don't have a battery system for the cameras. I will have to run them via a powerpack from the mains power so have a concern about some hostility between the two appliances each being powered from a mains source.

Any advice from any JVC ProHD owners will be greatly appreciated.

For the curious, here is a link to originator Steve Rice's 2003 assembly of some of the footage shot on his Canon XL1 before he bought the JVC. As oral histories, the emphasis was on least distraction/disturbance to the veteran interviewees so image quality was not always the greatest.

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paulbanks

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  • Real Name: Paul Banks

Re: THE JVC GY-HD*** FIREWIRE FRY DILEMMA.

PostFri Jun 11, 2021 6:19 pm

It's a pretty rare footage. I will bump this thread. Hope someone will help you out.
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Steve Fishwick

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Re: THE JVC GY-HD*** FIREWIRE FRY DILEMMA.

PostSun Jun 13, 2021 11:29 am

Robert, I still have my JVC GY-HD101 and I still love it. Though it's not useful for any professional production now (though it was used on many a broadcast show in its day), the images properly calibrated always seemed like Super 16mm to me. I use it now as a testing chain for Davinci Resolve, i.e uprezzing and chromatic aberration correction, etc. It is remarkable what you can now do with that old 720p footage.

What I have and do for legacy MiniDV, HDV 720p tapes is use a BR-HD50 deck that I bought at the same time (16 years ago). I ingest via HDMI with RS.422 deck control via an Ultrastudio Mini 4K, letting the the deck do the realtime conversion, which is very good, to 1080p, to DNxHD. The HDMI on this deck also has a very good error correction, absent over firewire. I still see these decks on eBay, going for very cheap. As long as they have not been hammered they are pretty durable (both my camera and deck are still like new). If I was involved with an archive project such as yours I would definitely go this route and forget firewire. Best of luck.
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robert Hart

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Re: THE JVC GY-HD*** FIREWIRE FRY DILEMMA.

PostSun Jun 13, 2021 2:45 pm

Paul and Steve.

Thank you for your informative responses.

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