Yesterday, I tested how long the Hawk-Woods 50Wh battery would run my Pocket 4K when the camera is on standby. The result is four posts up.
Tomorrow, I’ll test how long the battery will run the camera when I’m filming. In the Pocket 4K Operation Manual, Blackmagic gives an example. It says that the camera consumes 22 Watts when it does all of the following:
1. powers an external solid state storage drive such as a Samsung T5;*
2. communicates with an electronic lens;
3. maintains full screen brightness;
4. maintains full tally light brightness; and
5. records at a high frame rate.
In Blackmagic’s hypothetical example, the arithmetic says that a 50Wh battery should run the camera for: 50Wh ÷ 22W = 2.27h = 2h 16m. That is 51m less than Blackmagic's standby estimate, which works out to 3h 7m. As the post four up shows, I got 4h on my standby test, barely, but with accelerating falloff in power delivery starting at about 3h 30m.
For this second test, I’ll use settings that I think will be useful for me as rough guidance. These settings are different from the ones that Blackmagic uses in its example:
1. Recording Medium: CFast 2.0 card, Blackmagic approved, 256GB (when the camera display warns that the card is almost full, I’ll stop record and reformat the card);
2. Lens Communication: I use, and only have, manual lenses;
3. LCD Brightness: For the test, I’ll use 75% as an average; also “On” for Zebra, Focus Assist, False Colour, Frame Guide and Status Text;
4. Tally Light: “Off”, I don’t use this light;
5. Frame Rate: 24fps will do for the test, I rarely use high frame rates;
6. Audio: “None”, I don’t use the camera to record audio;
7. BlueTooth: “Off”, I don’t use Bluetooth;
8. Resolution: 4K UHD 3840 x 2160; and
9. Codec: ProRes 422.
When I've finished the test, I'll post a table like the one four posts up, showing the battery's performance from when it first powers the camera to when the camera shuts down.
* I interpret Blackmagic’s reference to “recording to external media” as a reference to SSDs. The full Operation Manual passage is in the following screen capture:
- BM%20User%20Manual.jpg (123.19 KiB) Viewed 11736 times