Overheating not an issue with external recording?

[tolmasky]

My apologies if this is well understood already, but I haven't found any clear answer for this. Is the current belief that if you are using an external recorder (like Ninja V for example), then 4K 60p will be unlimited and there will be no overheating issues? My intended use is that I'll usually be in a fairly fixed studio set up where I won't mind recording externally, and will only be using internal recording on rare occasions -- should I thus be fairly unconcerned about overheating *even if* the worst fears of its effects are true? Basically, I'm wondering if there is a similar table to what we've seen for internal recording limits/temperatures/etc. for external recording.

 

[Maximilian]

Hi tolmasky! And welcome to CR.

Heat sources in a camera are e.g. sensor chip, processor, other electronical periphery, the discharging of the battery and also the writing process to the memory card.
So external recording would take away only one of these sources.
And even though I have no numbers my guess would be that the the readout of the sensor chip and the processing in the CPU are the biggest heat sources.
So my guess is that you will have more or less the same recording limits. Sorry.

 

[SecureGSM]

Hi tolmasky! And welcome to CR.

Heat sources in a camera are e.g. sensor chip, processor, other electronical periphery, the discharging of the battery and also the writing process to the memory card.
So external recording would take away only one of these sources.
And even though I have no numbers my guess would be that the the readout of the sensor chip and the processing in the CPU are the biggest heat sources.
So my guess is that you will have more or less the same recording limits. Sorry.

Isn’t the maximum recoding time for certain resolutions / FPS is baked into the firmware?

 

[Maximilian]

Isn’t the maximum recoding time for certain resolutions / FPS is baked into the firmware?

For sure it is. There are also other reasons for max recording time, e.g. legal reasons if you define something as video camera without limits and so on...
Otherwise the manufacturer and therefore the user has to pay an extra fee in some countries.
TO avoid this fee the rec time is sometimes limited, too.

 

[tolmasky]

I believe that the EU Import Duty specifically has been eliminated and so that would no longer be a reason.

 

[pmjm]

An external recorder offloads a significant amount of processing. When you record internally, the camera's CPU must handle the realtime h.264/h.265 compression, which can be very taxing on the chip and generate a lot of heat. It's then sent to the card for writing. But when you record externally, the video stream is only encoded for HDMI which takes a fraction of the processing power of the codec compression.

What we don't know is how much of the heat is generated by those particular operations. Certainly some of it.

The challenges are that HDMI is currently limited, 4K60 is all the camera can output externally. If you want to record 8K or 4K120 you're limited to recording internally.

This will need to be tested and reported on.