Having issues with the Red Epic W using MoviPro power. Anyone else having this issue?

[adam brennan]

I'd like to wake up this thread to mention that I was using a movi pro this week with Scarlet W and Helium w/ Red 7" touch screen, and experienced the same screen freeze up issues. After about 10 minutes, both cameras would lock up. I removed the d-tap to sled cable and replaced it with a vmount battery. Worked flawlessly. So it's got to be that these cameras need more juice than what the sled from the Movi Pro can put out. Adding the vmount battery just made the setup heavier and more bulky. :-(

Go on Ebay and find Alvin's cables and there's no issues with those. I bought blackout media's version of it and it was nothing but problems and a huge waste of money.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/331804977652?ul_noapp=true

I offered $90 and they took it.

 

[Austin Straub]

Just chiming in...

Wasn't aware of this issue unfortunately until I was on set trying the exact same setup this week. Panic set in pretty quickly when my camera's fans just stopped spinning despite the green power light being on still. Tried rebooting, reconfiguring, everything – but still no monitor feed until I removed the WC POGO Cable and booted up. Camera stayed stable and perfect feed output over Teradek.

I ran out of time to get balanced after finally figuring this out, and scrambled back to handheld config. Used the WC POGO cable again (as I was having no issues in handheld config all day prior to this) and my monitor was completely green, couldn't see anything. Reboots and reseating did nothing. Finally gave up and mounted the wireless monitor and hammered out the last 3 shots before sunset. Super embarrassing, incredibly annoying, and honestly terrifying after hearing about WC top plates zapping stuff.

I emailed WC support and am awaiting a reply. But again, this cable seems to be the culprit and will definitely be ditching it for LEMO.


(FWIW – RED EPIC-W v7.1.0.1 and MOVI PRO v1.5.2 and 24" WC POGO to POGO)

 

[Austin Straub]

Okay, a quick update:

This appears to not be the fault of the WC Pogo Cable after all.

After methodically ruling out the Movi's power output to the RED and having the 7" Touch cabled vs cableless (I know, impractical, just for the sake of elimination), it has narrowed down to a weird set of circumstances.

1) Glitching and freezing and camera boot failure happen regardless of AC power vs onboard Movi Power.

2) This has nothing to do with RED Firmware (or at least hasn't been addressed on 7.1 or 7.2)

3) This only happens when pausing and reactivating motors on Movi Pro. Pausing causes glitching, reactivating causes freezing. One more cycle of it caused camera fans to fail and SDI output to Teradek to fail.

4) This only happens when the 7" touch is mounted to the top handle of the Movi Pro (vs laying on the work mat next to me while testing)

5) Out of curiosity, I moved the Freefly monitor quick release peg from the 1/4-20 hole on the 7" Touch to the hole on the WC POGO cable and have not been able to reproduce the issue. EDIT: after further testing the position of the mounting peg doesn't make a difference. Only that the monitor is mounted to the top handle.


So, I'm not an expert here, but this seems to be a case of some really funky interference between the 7" Touch and the Movi Pro. Specifically when the monitor is directly mounted to the top handle. Really bizarre.


Waiting on word back from WC, but I think it's safe to say this cable isn't the problem...

 

[DC Chavez]

So here is what I found out over time.. The Freefly batteries are garbage... They are fine for a few months, but in my case, stopped delivering proper power after a few months of use. I would have to power things on in stages to get it to work, and then during a power spike it would kill everything...

My solution was to buy the Ignite battery adapters to power everything via the DJI TB50 batteries. haven't had a single problem since, and I don't need to power things on in stages anymore...

 

[Austin Straub]

So here is what I found out over time.. The Freefly batteries are garbage... They are fine for a few months, but in my case, stopped delivering proper power after a few months of use. I would have to power things on in stages to get it to work, and then during a power spike it would kill everything...

My solution was to buy the Ignite battery adapters to power everything via the DJI TB50 batteries. haven't had a single problem since, and I don't need to power things on in stages anymore...

Totally makes sense, but the weird thing is that I was able to reproduce this while running the RED on wall power. As long as the monitor was docked on the top handle of the Movi, the glitches and shutdowns still happen. At first I thought it was the peg's position, but I got it to happen again this morning even mounting via the WC cable and not directly on the monitor. When holding the monitor in my hand, I did several motor pauses and power cycles with no issues.

 

[Blake Williams]

So I've had the same issue with the Epic-W, Scarlet-W, and Gemini. I have discovered a fix for the former two that unfortunately doesn't work with the Gemini, but it's worth a shot for those of you who are having this issue. Go into the monitor settings and change the refresh rate of your monitor from 60hz to 30hz. That stopped the glitching for me, although it does introduce some frame interpolation artifacts if you're shooting at 23.98 or 25. FWIW.