Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

NAB 2015 - Lies, damn lies and rampant speculation

Does anyone know whats cooking for Red? FB seems to have some rampant speculation going on as well..
 
This is exactly why I didn't buy a single redvolt.. what are you supposed to be able to do with a 20 minute shoot time?


I shot a ton of aerial footage with REDVolts. It's easier to keep a couple REDVolts in your pocket and swap than to hand hold an extra 2lbs up to a window and keep it steady.
 
Gavin, how are your Redvolts holding up? are the older ones still holding power?
 
Hey Terry sorry for the late reply i have been shooting:) LOVE MY DRAGON!!!!

any way back to it:

1.i discharged the batteries as much as i could by leaving them in the camera over night.
2.placed them into a sealed bag and whacked them into the freezer over night 11hours
3.took them out in the morning and wiped them down of any moisture and left them in room temp until the evening,
I decided to repeat so another 11hours in fridge and 11 hours at room temp (not sure if that actual did anything more)

charged them up and the result was 100% charge and lasting 30 to 32 mins, before this i was getting 68% to 78% charges.

I'm not sure if its an internet myth but it worked for me:)

EDIT

just double checked all the batts and 2 out of 6 are hitting 100% and the rest 98%

You must have magic Redvolts. As skeptical as I was about this I actually gave it a try.
It made zero difference.
 
You did the two day routine Bobby or just one day?

I'm considering it (as I said, I'd love to get 30+mins outta RVs), but I too am skeptical.
 
I did the two day routine with one battery and a one day routine with the other, there was no difference in either one of them.
 
I did the two day routine with one battery and a one day routine with the other, there was no difference in either one of them.

I suggest we need a larger sample size. This is interesting stuff. At least twenty participants would be helpful.
 
I suggest we need a larger sample size. This is interesting stuff. At least twenty participants would be helpful.

Or you could just contact Red and ask them if freezing a battery would have any effect at all on the overall performance of the battery.
 
This is exactly why I didn't buy a single redvolt.. what are you supposed to be able to do with a 20 minute shoot time?

20 minutes is nearly double what we need to run through a 1000ft. mag. And these RedVolts fit in a side handle too. And little bitty memory cards that can record for hours... Man, some of you guys just don't know how good you have it. ;P

But yeah, I agree to some extent. I own a dozen RedVolts and 4 of the XL ones and.... Meh. You know, it's not the capacity I complain about, it's the charge times! At times though, these little batteries are life savers, though.

As Jake pointed out, keeping one in your side handle keeps you from having to power-down the camera for other battery swaps. One of many handy uses.
 
Or you could just contact Red and ask them if freezing a battery would have any effect at all on the overall performance of the battery.

I do trust RED. A lot. But, with all due respect, asking RED about freezing batteries would be like asking Mother Teresa if divorce should be legal. I'd rather an independent study.
 
My understanding is that a Lithium Ion battery degrades when it stores charge.
The rate at which a charged battery degrades - reduces greatly near zero degrees C.
High charging (and discharging) rates also degrade a battery.

Mid 2013 there was a view that some Lithium Ion batteries exhibited a 'memory effect'.

"The memory effect only vanished if one waited a sufficiently long time after a cycle of partial charging followed by full discharge."

http://phys.org/news/2013-04-memory-effect-lithium-ion-batteries.html#jCp

AJ
 
The protocol seems to be to completely drain the REDVolts, then supercool them (freezer), then warm slowly to room temperature, and then charge up.

If this is truly a reliable way of keeping REDVolts performing up to spec, then a Quad Battery Module linked to a "current sink" would allow one to
"drain" REDVolts 4-at-a-time. The current sink would seem to be better than unnecessarily using a camera to drain the batteries.

Anyone interested in crafting such a "RED Current Sink" (RCS) for the Quad battery ? Maybe even RED ?

Just blue skying here ….

Thanks so much. I am going to try this..

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program.... :smiley:
 
I still think back to the day a few years ago (Scarlet-X shoot) where we needed to rig the camera really light weight on set for a odd last minute change to a VFX shot that required a sudden vertical slider move. I had 4 Redvolts charged in my kit that day. That janky improvised rig and that shoot won me a pretty decent cinematography award in 2013. That shoot paid for my Redvolts as far as I'm concerned.

... Ok you win lol.
 
OK so it appears the consensus is... we all wish for RED to give us new & improved RedVolts for Christmas (aka NAB)!! haha.
 
Back
Top