Ask HN: Why do cameras stop recording after 30 minutes?

Re:Ask HN: Why do cameras stop recording after 30 minutes? by randomdata on Friday February 03, 2023 @08:16AM (#34640617)

That may explain why it is exactly 30 minutes, but, despite some counterexamples, that we don't see more product differentiation enabling the consumer to choose between a camera with the limit and an "upgraded" model (i.e. the same camera with the limit disabled) suggests that underlying that the manufacturer recognizes that the consumer would rather buy under-specced hardware that can't handle much more than 30 minutes of recording than pay more for a design that had the engineering effort to handle unlimited recording put into it. Those who truly have a need for unlimited recording are likely to want something video-centric in design anyway.

I expect the answer is all of the above and more.

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Re:Ask HN: Why do cameras stop recording after 30 minutes? by Retric on Friday February 03, 2023 @08:24AM (#34640720)

Price discrimination is probably another, there’s a huge price jump between home video and production video equipment.

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Re:Ask HN: Why do cameras stop recording after 30 minutes? by ghaff on Friday February 03, 2023 @09:13AM (#34641237)

Pretty much everything in the audio and video space has a big price gap between "pretty darn good these days" and "pro."

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Re:Ask HN: Why do cameras stop recording after 30 minutes? by jfindley on Friday February 03, 2023 @08:49AM (#34641005)

Not really. The 30 minute limitation applies on even very high end DSLRs, but in practice this doesn't matter, because this isn't quite how DSLRs are used for video work.

In practice, video is done by using the HDMI output of the camera which will spit out continous 4k output without the 30 min limit, and without all the issues of needing to flush this to CFe/SD/XQD cards. You then caputre it on either a laptop or stand alone video capture device which will have functionally limitless storage. The sensor and processing engine is still running the whole time though, which means the camera needs to be specced to handle this (and they are). The only limitation is that you can't record to the internal storage, and as explained that doesn't matter.

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Re:Ask HN: Why do cameras stop recording after 30 minutes? by randomdata on Friday February 03, 2023 @09:17AM (#34641278)

A number of high end (still-centric) cameras are known for overheating problems during recording, even before the 30 minute mark is reached.

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Re:Ask HN: Why do cameras stop recording after 30 minutes? by toast0 on Friday February 03, 2023 @11:58AM (#34643878)

Using HDMI output and avoiding the compression and storage codecs probably helps with heat.

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Re:Ask HN: Why do cameras stop recording after 30 minutes? by randomdata on Friday February 03, 2023 @12:02PM (#34643968)

No doubt, but it remains that if there was a suitable market for the same camera + no record limit, even if at a premium to compensate for taxes + extra work, vendors would take notice and put in the necessary effort to engineer their devices to compensate for the heat. Without a suitable market, though, why bother? Design them only to the point that they can record for ~30 minutes and the market says that's good enough.

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Re:Ask HN: Why do cameras stop recording after 30 minutes? by michaelt on Friday February 03, 2023 @09:32AM (#34641453)

In general for things like memory management and thermal management, if a handheld device is going to hit its limits, it'll do so well before the 30 minute mark.

Either your thermal solution can remove the heat of your CPU going at full power, or it can't. And if it can't it'll hit the limits in 5 minutes not 30 minutes, unless it's a huge water-cooling system or something like that.

The main exception here is batteries - but lots of fancy cameras offer things like battery grips for people who want to shoot for hours on end.

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