Shooting for six hours straight with T3i, possible?

T

Thomas Theron Cooper

Member
I'm planning a shoot schedule wherein I will be capturing video for 5-6 hours at a stretch. I have a T3i will some good glass. I have never used it for that long. In the past after an hour or so I have seen the red light blinking when capturing video. I have also read about overheating issues related to the T3i. Assuming I don't run out of spare batteries and memory cards, is it reasonable to expect that the camera will hold up that long without shutting down. There will be 5-10 minute breaks every hour or so. It's not literally five hours straight.

I was considering buying or renting a video camera but for the time being, if I can manage with the T3i, I would think of doing that later. Please guide me. Thanks.
 
Much less stress using a video camera rather than a DSLR for this. As great as DSLRs are, this lengthy shooting situation is not their strong point.
 
Much less stress using a video camera rather than a DSLR for this. As great as DSLRs are, this lengthy shooting situation is not their strong point.
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I have the T3i already, a couple of prime lenses, a remote, a few batteries, a single charger, a double charger and some other assorted stuff. I'll be shooting a talking head. So if the T3i were to become my second camera after a video camera, I don't know what I would do with it other than use it for stills or in an emergency. In a couple of years if/when I get around to using it to shoot a short film or something it might just be obsolete.

GHKAM said:
If you're willing to buy a camcorder and already have the T3i batteries, you might consider buying a second (refurbished) T3i:
http://shop.usa.canon.com/shop/en/c...l-t3i-ef-s-18-55mm-is-ii-lens-kit-refurbished

After the first break, switch to the 2nd camera...after the second break, switch back to the first, etc.
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So, you're saying that a T3i can go one hour straight (shooting raw) without much trouble and a one hour break after that is enough to get it ready to be used for an hour again?
 
Thomas Theron Cooper said:
So, you're saying that a T3i can go one hour straight (shooting raw) without much trouble and a one hour break after that is enough to get it ready to be used for an hour again?
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Shooting "raw" as with Magic Lantern? Is that what you mean? FWIU, ML causes a lot of heat in the camera versus regular operation and eats up a ton of card space..I don't have the T3i model myself, but there are regular noin-Magic Lantern record limits you would know; if you have to hit record again after a certain amount of minutes.

Someone who is more familiar with the T3i would know your potential overheating issues.

There are also battery grips for battery power without constantly changing the battery:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=t3i+battery+grip

You can get a camcorder with large capacity batteries that will continuously record but, depending on the lighting, it will not do as well in low-light as a DSLR or mirrorless camera.
 
GHKAM said:
Shooting "raw" as with Magic Lantern? Is that what you mean? FWIU, ML causes a lot of heat in the camera versus regular operation and eats up a ton of card space..I don't have the T3i model myself, but there are regular noin-Magic Lantern record limits you would know; if you have to hit record again after a certain amount of minutes.
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Not with Magic lantern. Without it. The final output is in .mov format but the file sizes are huge.

GHKAM said:
There are also battery grips for battery power without constantly changing the battery:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=t3i+battery+grip

You can get a camcorder with large capacity batteries that will continuously record but, depending on the lighting, it will not do as well in low-light as a DSLR or mirrorless camera.
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I have a battery grip that takes two batteries. I'm not worried about batteries and memory cards. I want to avoid a situation where I have the talent and someone to assist me and after an hour of starting the shoot, the camera shuts down. I don't know if the T3i can handle a whole day of shooting video. I guess I'll have to do a trial run to figure it out.
 
Thomas Theron Cooper said:
Not with Magic lantern. Without it. The final output is in .mov format but the file sizes are huge.


I have a battery grip that takes two batteries. I'm not worried about batteries and memory cards. I want to avoid a situation where I have the talent and someone to assist me and after an hour of starting the shoot, the camera shuts down. I don't know if the T3i can handle a whole day of shooting video. I guess I'll have to do a trial run to figure it out.
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Originally, it sounded like you were to shoot a 5-6 hour event..if you're saying this is some narrative, music video, etc... you should be able to use it intermittently and turn it off when you can.

If it's of any help, someone on another forum, a couple of years back, used to use a T3i as his primary camera for weddings and I remember a post where he said he had an overheating issue just once.
 
GHKAM said:
Originally, it sounded like you were to shoot a 5-6 hour event..if you're saying this is some narrative, music video, etc... you should be able to use it intermittently and turn it off when you can.

If it's of any help, someone on another forum, a couple of years back, used to use a T3i as his primary camera for weddings and I remember a post where he said he had an overheating issue just once.
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It is going to be a 1-2 hour educational video but we will be able to take breaks in between for 5-10 minutes. I guess I will do a trial run. Like you suggested I guess I may buy another T3i to use too in case I experience overheating troubles during the trial run. Thanks!
 
I have a T3i. They have never had an overheating issue. That was only with the T2i and 5d2. Most if not all the Canon APS-C cams have a 12 minute 4 gig recording limit.

With Magic Lantern installed I believe you can record at a lower bitrate and extend the duration past 12 minutes in the same 4 gig file. It can also be used to span files effectively and restart after every 4 gigs is used up, but there will always be a slight blip and a few frames to seconds lost at the restart.

If you were to start one cam 30 seconds after the other with ML and spanning turned on you could get close to an hour of continuous video at the full bitrate before you would need a battery change on the second cam.

With all that said, I've done a number of interviews with two cams and I've never recorded for more than 2 minutes at a time before there is a break long enough to stop and restart. Most importantly, I don't know of any person who could possibly sit through a 15min educational video much less 1 - 2 hours of nonstop spray. If at all possible you need to set up the recording session with the talent sorted out to have 8 - 9 min. segments max. The modern gen-xr can't even come close to concentrating that long :)

Most modern educational pieces do some sort of the following in their work. Show => Do => Review => Pass through for each piece of the subject being learned. This type of learning will rarely let you get more than a couple minutes of anything straight through without a break.

I think a camcorder as a second cam is a much better idea if your work is going to be web based. They can be plugged in and record till the media is full. You will also then have an uninterrupted audio recording to use to sync all your other media with. Even if you are going to be using an external audio recorder for the final output the onboard audio from each cam can be used to line up the peaks and have perfect audio across the board. I use a Panasonic TM700 3 chip 1080-60p cam for this and it surprisingly has pretty nice color and detail for 1080 output. They can be found for as little as $350 - $500 these days used.

I also highly recommend you do a few dry runs to test all your systems before you try to put it all together. It's amazing what comes up to bite you in the heat of the moment. Practice definitely pays off for this type of thing.

Cheers,
Pete
 
c3hammer said:
I have a T3i. They have never had an overheating issue. That was only with the T2i and 5d2. Most if not all the Canon APS-C cams have a 12 minute 4 gig recording limit.
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I have never myself had the T3i shut down but I don't want to ruin the day. I'm definitely doing some dry runs before D-day.

c3hammer said:
With all that said, I've done a number of interviews with two cams and I've never recorded for more than 2 minutes at a time before there is a break long enough to stop and restart. Most importantly, I don't know of any person who could possibly sit through a 15min educational video much less 1 - 2 hours of nonstop spray. If at all possible you need to set up the recording session with the talent sorted out to have 8 - 9 min. segments max. The modern gen-xr can't even come close to concentrating that long :)
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That's very true. What we shoot may be split up into several smaller videos :)

c3hammer said:
I think a camcorder as a second cam is a much better idea if your work is going to be web based. They can be plugged in and record till the media is full. You will also then have an uninterrupted audio recording to use to sync all your other media with. Even if you are going to be using an external audio recorder for the final output the onboard audio from each cam can be used to line up the peaks and have perfect audio across the board. I use a Panasonic TM700 3 chip 1080-60p cam for this and it surprisingly has pretty nice color and detail for 1080 output. They can be found for as little as $350 - $500 these days used.
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I'll look into that camcorder as a second camera. I'm not sure if handling footage with two different looks will work well. I don't have much experience here. I'm trying to get the best possible quality I can afford. I have a Zoom H4n for external audio and a Sennheiser Lav. There are also enough batteries, chargers and memory cards. We can always back up the data on the card and format the card. My real concern is the camera shutting down and having to wait an hour before being able to use it again. The dry run should help here.

Thanks, Pete!
 
Thomas Theron Cooper said:
I have never myself had the T3i shut down but I don't want to ruin the day. I'm definitely doing some dry runs before D-day.
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Just to make sure we're all on the same page- You are looking to record 1 hour straight clips at a time, with 5-10 minute gaps in between?

The 12 minute limit mentioned above isn't from overheating. Its the 4GB file size limit that the storage system is forced into using. I can't tell if you are already aware of this or not, so I'm going to go ahead and explain it just in case this will save you some anguish later.

Standard SD cards can only allocate memory up to 4GB per file, so once you reach that limit, the camera MUST stop recording and end the file. At full resolution, that limit is reached in about 12-14 minutes of recording time. This is generally why Canon DSLRs are poor replacements for event cameras. They simply can't record long events. Those using it for weddings are recording clips of 12 minutes or less each, they don't just run the camera straight for an hour because it can't do that.

Magic Lantern lets you adjust the bitrate so it will take longer to reach that 4GB limit, but you will also be negatively effecting your image quality by compressing it more. And to stretch 12 minutes to an hour would probably mean lowering the bitrate and image quality beyond repair. Another feature in Magic Lantern is to auto-restart once that limit is reached. But there is a 3 second gap from when it finishes the previous file and starts the next one, so you'll have blips of missing footage in between clips when you combine them, as was mentioned above.

What you CAN do (and what I used to do back in the day recording long speeches with a Canon DSLR), is have a second t3i also recording with magic lantern auto-restart on, but start it a couple of minutes later than the first one. That way, whenever one camera has the 3 second gap between clips, you have another one still rolling that you can cut to during that part.

But if you don't have access to a second t3i, you're going to have to get some other kind of camera either way. And once you are doing that, you should really either consider a real video camera for this, or at least a DSLR-style one that doesn't have recording limits (like the Panasonic GHs- heck, even a GH1 is super cheap these days and will do this better than your t3i).
 
M. Gilden said:
Just to make sure we're all on the same page- You are looking to record 1 hour straight clips at a time, with 5-10 minute gaps in between?

The 12 minute limit mentioned above isn't from overheating. Its the 4GB file size limit that the storage system is forced into using. I can't tell if you are already aware of this or not, so I'm going to go ahead and explain it just in case this will save you some anguish later.
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This really addresses my major concern! I was worried about overheating causing troubke. The entire video will be shot in sequences. We can even have a break every ten minutes, of a minute or so. Replacing the card/batteries is no trouble at all. I have spare memory cards, spare batteries and chargers. If the T3i can withstand being used all through the day, then I think I can function with one camera alone. I thought it may overheat and give way with usage over a span of several hours.

Thanks!
 
Maybe it's just me, but I would never attempt to record a program like this with a single camera. I always used at least 3 cameras for events. One locked down as the wide shot, one locked down as a medium shot, and I worked the third getting tight shots. That way you can cut between cameras rather than a single angle, which can become very boring over the course of hours. Or a single camera zooming in and out, which looks very amateurish.
 
David W. Jones said:
Maybe it's just me, but I would never attempt to record a program like this with a single camera. I always used at least 3 cameras for events. One locked down as the wide shot, one locked down as a medium shot, and I worked the third getting tight shots. That way you can cut between cameras rather than a single angle, which can become very boring over the course of hours. Or a single camera zooming in and out, which looks very amateurish.
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I understand what you mean. My team will be three people including the talent. I could invest in a video camera and use it instead of the T3i but managing three cameras at once with just one person to assist me would be too ambitious. The videos are going to be split up into 5-7 minutes each. So I'm hoping that a wide shot and a medium shot interspersed with some B-roll and stock shots would be able to hold interest.
 
Thomas Theron Cooper said:
I understand what you mean. My team will be three people including the talent. I could invest in a video camera and use it instead of the T3i but managing three cameras at once with just one person to assist me would be too ambitious. The videos are going to be split up into 5-7 minutes each. So I'm hoping that a wide shot and a medium shot interspersed with some B-roll and stock shots would be able to hold interest.
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Sounds like a plan. Just make sure you try editing your dry run to see if the result is going to work.
As for shooting without a crew and multiple cameras- Something I intend to try one of these days, is the new Panasonic mobile app that lets you remotely control and see the viewfinder live on a phone/tablet. That way, you could potentially leave a wide camera unmanned while you operate the tight, and remotely control and monitor the other camera from that location. Obviously this won't work with a T3i, but if you ever wanted to try something like that, the possibilities are there!
 
M. Gilden said:
Sounds like a plan. Just make sure you try editing your dry run to see if the result is going to work.
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Yes. I'm surely going to do that!

M. Gilden said:
As for shooting without a crew and multiple cameras- Something I intend to try one of these days, is the new Panasonic mobile app that lets you remotely control and see the viewfinder live on a phone/tablet. That way, you could potentially leave a wide camera unmanned while you operate the tight, and remotely control and monitor the other camera from that location. Obviously this won't work with a T3i, but if you ever wanted to try something like that, the possibilities are there!
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That sounds very interesting. Maybe someday I will, after I have better control.

Thanks!
 
Thomas Theron Cooper said:
I have also read about overheating issues related to the T3i.
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I had a 550D and a 7D that both overheaded all the time. I have a 60D and 600D and neither has ever overheated. When the 7D and 550D had problems I kept my spare batteries in a a cold place and whenI switched batteries the heat warning shut off. But now having 2 camera I can rotate makes life even simpler. You might consider getting a 2nd T3i if this becomes a routeen type of project for you.
 
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