5D Mark III ususual behavior

B

benchasephoto

New member
Hi all -

I recently was on a shoot that consisted of a lot of interview footage with a 5D III using an external HDMI monitor and battery grip. Periodically, the unit powered off during long takes (10 to 20 minutes) with what I presume may have been overheating. There was no message on the screen, just a straight power down. In some instances, the camera would not respond even with a new battery inserted (with or without battery grip attached). After a period of about 10 minutes powered-off, the camera appeared to operate as normal.

In all instances save one, the footage up to the point of the shutdown was recorded. Unfortunately, in one clip that was somewhere in excess of 12 minutes, the footage was lost and I didn't find any partial files using recovery tools on the CF. What puzzles me is that a new file is supposed to be generated after 4 GB of recording, and the camera will indicate when this happens on the screen, so I don't understand why I don't have at least a few files from that session before it powered down.

Any thoughts on what the possible cause may have been? Based on the warmth of the camera body and what I had read previously about overheating, I had assumed that overheating was the cause, but in review, I am starting to wonder if it was something else.

All of the cards I used were the Sandisk extreme pro 160mb/s. Camera was set to ALL-I to make editing easier.

I would appreciate any thoughts or ideas, or any other reports where similar events have occurred. The one piece of footage that didn't make it onto the CF card was a very important clip.

Thanks in advance -
Ben C
 
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Sudden shutoff without any warning? Could be a power issue. What kind of batteries were you using? Canon or cheapies? Are all your contacts clean and have no corrosion?
 
That was the first thing I thought of, some kind of power issue. However, we had a total of 9 batteries, 4 of them were brand new, all of the contacts were just fine and all of the batteries worked fine in the 2 5D II's that I had as well. There was no issue with the batteries. All are Canon-branded LP-E6's....I've never had any desire to look at 3rd party for that kind of stuff, especially on a real production. I am also running the latest firmware (not ML, just the latest Canon official release).

The fact that the unit powered back up after about 10 minutes the first time it happened with the same batteries is what took me down the path of believing it was overheating, which doesn't appear to be the case as a warning should pop up when the camera is getting too hot. Subsequent power-down issues didn't always require about a 10 minute wait, in some cases it was sooner, but there was definitely a period of time where you could not power the camera on even after removing/replacing batteries.

I've never had an issue similar to this with a 5D3 before.
 
I can't say exactly about your problem, but I had an issue like this and it was related to the HDMI output. Maybe you had a suspect HDMI cable/connection? I lost some footage by unplugging the HDMI cable while recording. This was a while ago with the previous firmware though.
 
Hmm. I guess a call to Canon service is in order. Look into joining CPS if you're out of warranty. It's a really good program that discounts your repairs, gets you loaners, etc.
 
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