David Wyatt
Well-known member
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2007
- Messages
- 887
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 16
- Location
- London
- Website
- www.davidwyattdop.com
Is there any way at all the battery warning ("system will power down in 30 seconds, 29 seconds" blah blah...) could give you a little longer than the measly 30 seconds it is right now. I know the voltage is displayed as a percentage on the status screen but you're not always looking at that. Can there be some kind of warning 5 minutes before the battery's out that flashes up at the bottom of the screen (preferably on the preview HD-SDI too because we don't have the EVF yet and have decided against the LCD).
The Red camera has so many benefits to sell it to potential producers like the ability to not have to reload all day with the RedDrive (saving you valuable minutes in the day), but this is all 100% reversed if your camera battery runs out in the middle of a scene (the interminable 60 seconds of rebooting obviously completely wipes out any benefit of not having to reload and we all just stand there, red-faced and nervously whistling to our ourselves until the camera's rebooted :blush:
I understand completely that the camera's essentially a computer and it takes a long time to boot up, but what makes no sense AT ALL is that the on-screen battery voltage warning is so measly...30 seconds??? WTF?? Most other professional cameras you can actually set at what stage you want the battery warning to go off (10%, 5% etc) - surely that must be possible?
On a related point I also managed to discover (by accident!) that if you're recording when the 30 second battery warning comes up and you keep recording till the camera shuts itself down safely, then you won't get any of the material you shot while that warning was flashing (using the RedDrive, that is). It was a long 2 minute take and I think we only got about half of it when we played it back. I don't know if that is normal, but that's what appeared to happen recently. On the flip side when our camera died a horrible death a while ago all of the footage on the Compact Flash card survived right up to the point of death. I haven't tried testing whether all the footage survives on the RedDrive when the battery warning goes off BUT you stop recording and power down manually before the 30 seconds is up. Anyone tried this? Do you get all the footage right up till the moment you stop recording?
The Red camera has so many benefits to sell it to potential producers like the ability to not have to reload all day with the RedDrive (saving you valuable minutes in the day), but this is all 100% reversed if your camera battery runs out in the middle of a scene (the interminable 60 seconds of rebooting obviously completely wipes out any benefit of not having to reload and we all just stand there, red-faced and nervously whistling to our ourselves until the camera's rebooted :blush:
I understand completely that the camera's essentially a computer and it takes a long time to boot up, but what makes no sense AT ALL is that the on-screen battery voltage warning is so measly...30 seconds??? WTF?? Most other professional cameras you can actually set at what stage you want the battery warning to go off (10%, 5% etc) - surely that must be possible?
On a related point I also managed to discover (by accident!) that if you're recording when the 30 second battery warning comes up and you keep recording till the camera shuts itself down safely, then you won't get any of the material you shot while that warning was flashing (using the RedDrive, that is). It was a long 2 minute take and I think we only got about half of it when we played it back. I don't know if that is normal, but that's what appeared to happen recently. On the flip side when our camera died a horrible death a while ago all of the footage on the Compact Flash card survived right up to the point of death. I haven't tried testing whether all the footage survives on the RedDrive when the battery warning goes off BUT you stop recording and power down manually before the 30 seconds is up. Anyone tried this? Do you get all the footage right up till the moment you stop recording?
