I was curious what other editors were doing as far as using multiple brands of tapes from job to job. I mean I know the rule, stick to one brand of tapes. But editors don;t really seem to have a choice. Do you just clean the heads every time you switch brands and that works? Or is there something else? Lucky for me the gig I'm working on at the moment gave me a seperate deck to capture from since they did not shoot on the same brand stock I normally use.

In my case, with a DSR11, I will run a tape head cleaner occasionally, because I get different stocks (wet and dry) through it. But because it is a deck, the transport mechanism is by nature, a bit hardier than a camera, so its not as likely to have the same clogging problems with transport and heads that you are going to find in a cam.

Never had a problem with deck. Worked a lot with DSR40 and tapes from 5 camera crews. Off course, they all had different brands of tape (Sony, Fuji, Maxell, JVC and Panasonic - hello mr. Murphy :-))...Never had to clean the heads. Like Richard said decks have more robust tape transports and heads.

Cool, well that was indeed my next question. Can you recomend a deck. Nothing too fansy.

I reccomend the DSR 11. About $1600. There are some other dv decks that play SVHS and MiniDV, around $800 I think, but they are hit and miss.