ADVC-300 no connection to computer

[Argo]

Hello.

I have an ADVC-300 and have always had issues with it. Sometimes it seems to work fine other times it randomly stops working and randomly starts working again. After having an issue with it not responding to anything, I power cycled it a few times and it works ok for now as a standalone device, however it now does not communicate with any computer at all.

I have an intel Imac and intel mac book which both have firewire. I have tried connecting it to the imac and the mac book and it is not recognized by any software or the operating system. I have tried running it under bootcamp/windows and still no go. My firewire ports work fine since i already have hard drives in them. I have disconnected the drives and tried the advc-300 in the firewire of the machine, and in the firewire of the hard drives with no sense that anything was plugged in. Anything to help? Is there a random pushign of buttons that can fix this? a reset?

I can not find my proof of purchase so I am guessing my warrenty is void, however if it is still available i would love to get it fixed. For paying $500+ for this unit, and the amount of use it has received, I thought I was getting a quality product, however it seems I have been sadly mistaken. Even the quality of the unit feels cheap compared to other devices.

Again, if there is a simple reset that can be done, or this can still be fixed under warrenty,great, however unless something can be done I will not be purchasing a canopus product again. I understand that the advc-300 is not a high end product, but it should still be a quailty product.

Thank you
Mark

[GrassValley_BH]

Hi Mark,

There's a bit of due diligence to be done here, if you haven't already... So first of all, have you contacted Grass Valley support?

How long have you had the unit?

Build quality is a matter of individual opinion and you're entitled to your own.

One thing I will comment on is daisy-chaining DV devices with other Firewire devices...

DV is a streaming transfer so it requires a fixed amount of always-available bandwidth. There's very little buffering involved, so it's like drinking from a fountain. The water flows out at a steady rate whether you can drink all the water coming out or not.

When you put other Firewire devices on the bus, those devices also take up bandwidth. Some devices like hard drives tend to burst transfers, taking large amounts of bandwidth at a time then not transferring much at all. The problem here is those large transfers can interrupt the flow of the DV stream.

Back to the water fountain analogy, you might be able to keep up with drinking the water running out of the fountain so nothing comes dribbling down your shirt, but when you add something in between, the water might shoot out a liter in a second then nothing for a while. Surely most people can't drink down a liter in a second and now you have spillage.

In the DV transfer, that spillage is lost data, which equates to dropped frames or a gross interruption of the signal entirely.