Battery Life When Shooting Video?
 

Hi all:

My 5D MKII arrives next week. I have only shot with the 5D MKII once before so I never discovered what type of battery life you can expect when shooting video? I know on my HPX170, with the large Panasonic batteries, I can expect about 3-4 hours per battery of intermittent shooting mixed with a lot of standby time.

What about the 5D MKII? It will come with one battery and a friend is selling me a spare of his. If I want to have capacity to go out and shoot 2-3 hours of footage per day, will two batteries do it or do I need to hunt down another battery or two?

Dan

today I did a back to back live SD recording with 4gb cards, on the fourth one after 10 min, I had to change it.

So I had 35min x3 on 4gb cards and another 10min on the fourth (one fully charged battery).

Two OEM`s are gonna take you easily through 3 hours.

go with a grip. i got one (holds two batteries) i was able to shoot 130 mins of video with a quarter of battery life left...

I regularly fill up two 8GB cards and the batt indicator does not even drop one notch. Did a cooking shoot a few weeks back with 5D2 as my B-cam...shot all day on one battery while recording about 2 hours of footage and I forgot to turn the camera off during lunch so it was on for most of the day.

Thanks for your experience and recommendations all. The 5D MKII shows up on Thursday.

Dan

Congrats Dan! Is it replacing anything? Supplementing anything?

Hi Steev:

It arrived just a couple of hours ago. Unfortunately the KAWA lens adapters don't arrive until tomorrow or Friday so I can't really do more today than admire the box since I have no Canon lenses ;-) Nice box.

No, it is strictly for a documentary I am shooting in France for most of June. I have a need for HD video and for stills so I thought I would rather just bring a 5D MKII than a larger HD camcorder and a DSLR. Bough the Zacuto Z-Finder (it arrive yesterday, looks great), the Zoom H4N for audio and four Kawa Nikon F mount to EOS lens adapters. The deal is I will be selling the 5D MKII after I return from the trip unless I fall in love with it. If Canon introduces manual shutter and ISO, that would make me fall in love with it. If not, I will probably sell this and try a Panasonic GH1 when they become available.

I have too many cameras:

Video
Panasonic DVX100A
Panasonic Mini DV consumer (I have lots of car mounts that I use this tiny DV camera for)
Panasonic HVX200
Panasonic HPX170

Still
Canon SD800iS p&s
Canon AE-1
Nikon F75
Nikon F100
Nikon D80
Nikon D300
Canon 5D MKII

I should probably thin the herd before I buy an HPX300.

Thanks,

Dan

Wow! I don't feel so crazy anymore with my 4 cameras.

Back to the battery life, now that I have shot a bunch of test material with the 5DMkII, the battery life can get pretty meager, but that's using OIS on a Canon lens. I would guess a single battery doesn't last more than an hour of use. I'll have to see what that's like with continuous use of my Nikon glass.

-steev