C300: Takes frickin' forever to boot

brettsherman

brettsherman

Well-known member
This is something that has annoyed me since day 1 with the C300. It takes frickin' forever to go from off to recording. Worse, it seems like it is tied to the size of the CF card. I just got a 128GB card so I could go two days shooting without swapping cards. Now the boot time to recording is about 25 seconds. Up from 64GB where it's about 15 seconds. I don't know how many shots I've missed waiting for the camera to boot. Not to mention the embarrasment of having to tell someone to please hold that pose while my camera boots up. I've never had a camera that has been this slow to turn on. Heck my Macbook Pro boots faster. My GH4 with 128 GB card - boot to record is 1 second.

#1 Is this normal and #2 I don't suppose there is anyway to speed this up.
 
I don't shoot with anything larger than 32GB cards and still have the same issue. Wish it booted up faster(as well as the ninja blade). Have adopted the strategy of just leaving the camera on and carrying more batteries.
 
With the C100 it is about 15-25 seconds as well. I'm with Leo on this; I don't turn the camera off. Three batteries lasting five hours each. That means I only have to turn the camera off twice on a 15 hour shoot, and with a battery indicator and five hours it's unlikely that I'll need to turn it off just as an important shot is approaching. I leave it on during lens changes with no issues after having read no one else having issues with hot swapping. For the first year I had the camera I avoided hot swapping and the slow boot up time was one of my biggest complaints with the camera, but now that I hot swap regularly it's hardly an issue anymore.

Will leaving it on shorten the life of your camera? I doubt it. Cameras are basically computers and I leave my computers on for probably 80% of the five or so years I use them. I used to work at Home Shopping Network which has live TV 24/7 so they keep their cameras on in all the studios all the time except for Christmas day when they take the day off.
 
Use the lens exchange function to put the camera to sleep instead of powering down. Boot up time on the canons is nothing compared to any red or Alexa model.
 
Have never timed my C100 - but its definitely not quick... I know there have been times when I've turned the camera on and have been hitting record over and over again waiting for the red record light to come on - seems like 7-10 seconds bootup time.

I have noticed a significant difference in time to format a card depending on the media I give it. I have a few Duracell 200X cards that format in 5-7 seconds. If I use regular Kingston 30mb/s cards, they take 25-35 seconds to format (which when you're shooting an event seems like FOREVER! heh).
 
Eric Coughlin said:
I'm with Leo on this; I don't turn the camera off. Three batteries lasting five hours each.
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I'm arriving at this point, especially with the 128gb card. I can easily burn through 3 batteries on the C300 on a long day. I guess I need to take a fourth with me.

I also hot-swap lenses. I know you can do it with Lens Exchange, but I need to set up a shortcut button for it. Of course, I've had this camera for 2 years and have been hot-swapping without issue.
 
I have a Sandisk 32GB card in mine. The screen comes up in 4 seconds, but it's hard to know exactly how long it goes before record comes on because you don't know exactly when the opportune moment is to hit record after the screen comes on....... that said, I got 6 seconds before it began to record. For me at least it's a non issue!
 
I stand corrected, you can tell exactly how long it takes for the record to come on by waiting for standby to appear on the screen....... again for me 6 seconds. Like an idiot, I've been turning my camera off and on all morning...... I'm now a certified expert on this!
 
Just timed it (on the C100) with 32GB and 64GB Sandisk cards. I didn't notice a difference in ready to record time on the 64GB vs 32GB.

Turn on: 4 seconds
Ready to record: 8 seconds (total)

Important note here is that is recording to one memory card. Dual record (which I often use) increases ready to record time. With dual record on the times are...

Turn on: 4 seconds
Ready to record: 12 seconds (total)


I thought it took longer from what I remember of last time I timed it (perhaps a year and a half ago), so either some settings got changed (maybe the newer firmware with the 80,000 ISO improved start-up time) or I'm just remembering wrongly.



brettsherman said:
I'm arriving at this point, especially with the 128gb card. I can easily burn through 3 batteries on the C300 on a long day. I guess I need to take a fourth with me.
Click to expand...
I have three Canon brand batteries and four off brand ($28 a piece and last about 3-4 hours each) which is about 30 hours of battery and keeps my two C100s running throughout the day.
 
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jm.gardiner said:
Use the lens exchange function to put the camera to sleep instead of powering down. Boot up time on the canons is nothing compared to any red or Alexa model.
Click to expand...

My RED does it in 9 seconds.

The C300 I use is about the same, maybe less. Definitely not 25+ seconds and that's with 64gb cards.
 
I got my camera back from Canon with Dual-pixel upgrade and the latest firmware upgrade. Still not good. 15 seconds for 64 GB card, 25 seconds for 128 GB. Might be slightly better than before, but 25 seconds is too long. Guess I bought that 128 GB card for nothing.

Also formatting to ExFat does not improve the speed with 128GB or less. Actually it took Initializing it twice to get it to read the card. That scares the crap out of me so I won't be using ExFAT.
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I have two C300's, one just got the dual-pixel upgrade. Both start up in ~4.3 seconds w/Sandisk 32 GB cards (formatted but empty), cameras set to dual record. Both able to shoot w/in ~8 seconds.

I can't say that I have ever noticed if it takes longer to boot if there is more data on the card. If that's not the issue you could reset the camera to factory default. See how long it takes to boot. Then systematically go through customizing settings to however you normally configure the camera and see if one of them is causing a longer boot time.

Other factors: Are you formatting your cards in the camera? What brand and speed of card are you using? Is there non-Canon C300 data on the card that could be causing an issue?
 
I remember It's a bit slower than say a DSLR but nowhere near the 25 and 30 second marks I am seeing here that's way too long. There must be factors that do affect boot time comsiderablly.
 
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