It´s far from useless! A couple of years ago I worked on a feature shot on RED. Back then we didn´t have the hotswap option and it took about 90s to boot the ****er, not very fun being paranoid about
battery power for 50 days
On the Alexa I use both a block
battery and a v-lock
battery when on a tripod. The V-lock acts as a reserve if the block
battery runs out, it makes it possible to hot swap and it makes it faster to move the camera as I can leave the block
battery behind. If the DOP wants to shoot handheld I can just unplug the block
battery attach the handcamera and run it of the v-lock
battery with no rebooting.
Everything that the v-lock does in the examples above the internal
battery on the bmcc does. The nice thing the internal
battery does that the v-mount on a Alexa doesn´t do is charge when you plug it into a block
battery. If you shoot handheld with the internal
battery you could just plug it into a block
battery between takes and that way have a smaller lighter camera without the need of a external
battery on the rig.
Hans Engstrom
1st AC