I think I may have joined the ranks of those that have damaged the Firewire board in their JVC GY HD-100U camera. Despite my knowledge of the existing Firewire port problem and my care at trying to avoid encountering the problem, I apparently did something wrong.

This weekend I attempted to use the camera with a Firestore HD-100 and the camera wouldn't "talk" to the Firestore. I brought the camera back to my office, plugged it into a Firewire port on my Mac G5 and opened up Final Cut. I selected the DV-NTSC option in FCP "Easy Setup" and got and error message telling me it couldn't locate the Apple Firewire device.

My problem (among others) is that I know just enough about these things to be dangerous. Is there anything else I can do to test the Firewire capabilities of my camera or have I done enough to conclude that the board in the camera is bad? I've checked the menu options for the JVC HD-100 and I believe that my configuration is correct. I've plugged a hard drive into the Mac G5 Firewire port and it shows up on the desktop. I'm not sure what else to do. Any suggestions?

Hi Lance,

Try shutting down your G5 and starting up again. On one occasion it was my computer. A long shot but worth trying.

To eliminate the possibility it is a setting on FCP try also capturing using DVHSCAP.

Rob

Hi Robert.


I've just finished posting a yarn on the Sony threads about a problem we had on the Congoro shoot with Steve's HD-100 camera, which as you know has not long come back from the camera doctor. We firstly assumed the camera doctor might have got it wrong.

The camera refused to talk to the DR-100. Jim Frater went straight to the problem. His solution was bit frightening but worked within 15 seconds.

It seems the metal shield around the socket on the JVC is not very robust and spreads out quite wide, leaving the plug very insecure and no longer mechanically supported by the shield which is the loadbearing structure.

Jim took out his Leatherman tool and squeezed the socket shield back into its correct shape, a snug fit around the plug shield.

An intermittent contact from a loose plug might be just as much a cause of the blown boards as hot swapping as the pin alignments will be off and the hot pin must, not just maybe, eventually make contact with something destructively with a loose plug.

Steve now has and uses the short link cord which apparently isolates the hot pin.

Thanks for the input. I suspect it's not just a G5 problem given the issue I'm having getting the JVC camera to talk with the HD-100. I did power-off the G5 a couple of times in my original trouble shooting session and didn't get any positive result.

The loose connection at the camera's Firewire port sounds logical. I noticed early on with the JVC HD-100 that the Firewire socket connection seemed a bit tenuous. That might explain why, even though I've been very careful not to "hot swap" the Firewire plug, I've still encountered this problem. Not sure I have the nerve to grab a Leatherman and squeeze the port together, but then, at this stage maybe it can't hurt.

As always thanks for the input, as with Blanche Dubois, I've always depended on the kindness of strangers.