14Mar DSLR battery management on film projects
Rob was asking about battery management and storage yesterday. I realized it’s something I’ve never really spent much time talking about. While battery management isn’t a very sexy topic of conversation it’s pretty important to the filmmaking process. After all you can’t really film anything if you don’t have power.
On most of the projects I work on, I usually have a random person assigned to me with the task of “helping out” or “keeping an eye on things”. While these individuals are generally very nice and good at getting you to locations, grabbing food, and corralling people, they aren’t usually very technically savvy when it comes to camera equipment. For that reason I keep each type of battery I use in a colored bag with a label written in magic marker indicating the type of battery. Each battery has either the battery plate or a rubber band placed on it to indicate that it has been charged.
When I’m in the middle of filming, I don’t want to stop and run back to my camera bags two rooms away to grab a few batteries to reload. Making the batteries easy to identify and find makes it very easy to send someone else back to the equipment bag to grab the batteries I need. I keep the batteries and a couple of charges in each bag making things pretty easy to figure out.
If I say “Grab 2 batteries out of the green bag labeled LP-E8.”, they have no problems finding the bag and bring back the correct batteries I need. I change out the batteries and hand them the two spent batteries and ask them to put those batteries on the chargers located in the same bag.
The canvas bags have the added bonus of keeping your batteries isolated from the rest of your kit which reduces the risk of batteries shorting out. While I’ve never had a battery explode, I have had a few superheat after coming in contact with a pin or paper clip in my backpack. This has resulted in some molten plastic holes in a few things over the years.
The bags also make it easier to locate batteries. If you have a handful of batteries floating around in your camera bag, you might have a hard time locating them when you need them. The larger colored canvas bags make them much easier to spot.
How many times have you lost a battery and charger because you left it on a wall somewhere? That can mean $30 to $60 down the drain. Keeping all of those items together gives you an easy way to check inventory before you leave a shoot. I’ve explained this method to a few people and they’ve taken it a bit further by adding a flash card with battery and charger counts to each bag. At the end of a shoot they double check their inventory with what’s on the card. If it doesn’t match up, the search is on.
If you guys have any ideas, suggestions, or improvements upon this plan, let me know. This is the method I’ve developed over years of shooting but I’m always willing to try something else if there’s a better way.
March 14th, 2014 at 12:22 pm
I use mostly LP-E6 batteries and I like to keep the plastic caps on whenever they aren’t being used. To tell the charged ones from the empties, I used a silver sharpie to draw a half circle on the side of the plastic cap and a half circle on the side of the battery. When the battery is charged and ready to go, I snap the plastic cap on so that the two half circles line up – whole circle equals charged battery. When the battery needs to be charged, I flip the cap around (LP-E6s are symmetrical, unlike LP-E8s), so that the half circles are on opposite sides – half circle equals battery that needs to be charged. That probably sounds more complicated than it is – it’s pretty simple and fast in practice!
March 14th, 2014 at 1:17 pm
Hah, for full batts I just put the orange cover on so that the blue portion of the (genuine Canon) battery label shows through the little battery-shaped cutout on the plate.
When discharged, I replace the cover so that it’s the other way, and the black blank area of the battery shows through the little cutout. Works great! Until I lose the cover-plates.
Definitely like the color-coded battery bags though!
March 14th, 2014 at 1:34 pm
The plate flip might be easier than marking each battery with a silver pin like Daniel suggested. Never really noticed that until you pointed it out.
March 15th, 2014 at 11:24 am
I have some genuine LPE6 batteries and a lot of aftermarkets. Almost all different manufacturers and thus differently colored stickers.
I’ve attached small pieces of green and red tape to all of them. This makes it easy and consistent across all my batteries. Green = charged and Red = discharged.
Haven’t had colorblind people on my crew, but you could easily change the red for black or something if that is a problem.
Btw, Deejay, the trick with the battery cap is even listed in the canon manual. But yeah, who reads those? 😉
Now I just need to find something like this for my CF cards…
March 15th, 2014 at 2:01 pm
I actually read most of the manual, but I tend to skip parts like “installing batteries” which probably led me to miss that little bit of info. As for the CF cards I use a 6 or 8 card case. Empty cards have the label face up and full cards go in label face down and I do the same with my SDXC cards. Helps me keep track of how much footage I’ve shot and how much space I have left before I need to transfer. If it’s a very important job, I tend to hand the card off to be copied as soon as it leaves the camera, then place the card upside down and use it as a backup.
March 14th, 2014 at 2:33 pm
Good topic. It may not be sexy but it’s the meat and potato stuff that you only learn after working for a while. I actually color code my batteries with colored gaff tape on every side and use airsoft grenade pouches to hold them on a Think Tank work belt. The covers never worked great for me since they seem to come off easily or get lost. I like the idea of the thick rubber band to cover the terminals and maybe using colored bands to show which batteries are drained. Those are cheap!
March 14th, 2014 at 3:13 pm
You got me thinking about it last night. My method seems pretty straight forward to me, but it’s the type of thing you don’t really think about when you are starting out.
March 19th, 2014 at 5:58 am
Good post. The amount of times I have said “grab me a camera battery” and someone comes back with monitor battery, an AA battery etc etc. Never bothered to actually sort a solution out. Will do now.