Ask HN: Why do cameras stop recording after 30 minutes?
2 years ago
Some say it's a technical limitation for heat management, memory management. While some others say it's to escape the additional tax that applies if a camera is classified as a video camera, the latter being defined as something that records beyond 30 minutes.
What's the true reason?
Like most head scratchers, it’s EU taxes.
The import taxes are higher on video cameras than still cameras, so they artificially limit the length of videos you can record to avoid being classified as a video camera.
> Video camera recorders are subject to import duty of 4.9% or 14%, still image cameras are duty free.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2016-00127...
(Update: included better link)
In Nathan For You, they try to dodge export taxes on smoke detectors by classifying them as a musical instrument. They went as far as creating a band with a "hit song" that features a smoke detector.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN_ElpaabJU
Seems like that tax has been scrapped though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B9GLrJoUA8 So like other commenters point out, at this point it’s more likely to be market segmentation. Sony and Canon, for example, make professional video cameras that are very similar to their photo cameras, but have extra video-centric features i.e. built-in ND filters, connectors for professional battery packs, XLR audio connectors etc. They want to give users extra reasons to buy these models (although Sony apparently removed the limit recently, so looks like they’re moving away from this strategy).
That reminds me of how Converse Chuck Taylors have a small layer of fuzz on the bottom of the sole that wears away after a wearing it for a bit.
Seemed totally bizarre, until you learn that it was so they can be classified as "slippers" which had a much smaller import tax than sneakers.
It still astonishes me that a legal hack like that works.
https://www.gearpatrol.com/style/shoes-boots/a715423/convers...
It's because they're trying to essentially legislate taxonomy, which is nearly impossible.
It's the impetus behind the question "Is a hotdog a sandwich?" What does it mean to be a sandwich? What are the properties of sandwichness? When does something stop being a sandwich?
What's the line between pasta and bread? Bread and cake? Shoe and slipper? The fact that all fruits are vegetables, but not all vegetables are fruits, but it turns out most of them are, in fact, fruits, and half our fruits are actually nuts or some shit.
So to put an exemption on a "slipper", you have to rigidly define what a slipper is. Because "yeah, that's a slipper" doesn't pass muster. Because you and I can disagree on what a slipper is. On where the line between slipper and shoe is. But if we legally define a slipper as any article of clothing designed to be worn on the foot with a felted or cloth sole. Boom, we have something we can agree on. As long as the item meets all of the legal qualifications, it's legally a slipper. And we can fuck subjectivity right out the window.
But of course, where there are rules, there are games. And the goal of the game is to get as much as possible while giving up as little as possible.
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To be fair, I wear mine like slippers. Haven't tied 'em in months, let's say I'm lazy.
It’s always interesting to find what businesses will do to lower these. My favorite is Converse sneakers.
https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-converse-sneakers-...
Reminds of the time when Britain's finest legal minds were paid exorbitant fees to resolve the extremely important question of whether a particular brand of sugary snack should be considered a "chocolate-covered biscuit" or a "chocolate-covered cake". The taxman must get what's his!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes
The American version is trucks that have extra seats added which are then removed once imported, ready to be used on the next truck to be imported.
So this is like Sony adding Linux as an option to the PS3 to make it a "general computing device" instead of a "game console" and getting a lower duty percentage?
Spain used to have an extra import tax on home computers with <=64KB RAM. One manufacturer got around it by including an extra 8KB chip on a daughterboard (not electrically connected at all!) to increase the RAM to 72KB and avoid the tax.
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This is almost as stupid as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax
>At that time, many people in Britain opposed income tax, on principle, because the disclosure of personal income represented an unacceptable governmental intrusion into private matters, and a potential threat to personal liberty.
I didn't know the British used to be so cool.
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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.
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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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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Price discrimination is probably another, there’s a huge price jump between home video and production video equipment.
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Finally. The first _good_ reason for Brexit.
Don’t know about that. Brexit only created yet another tax/regulatory domain that companies have to negotiate.
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Because you really want to record movies longer than 30 minutes on your phone?
Not even sure if the UK has changed this already.
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And what's the current UK import duty on camcorders?
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Funny how bureaucratic nonsense from a comparatively small population can have such a ripple effect across a global industry.
Folks all over the world have to settle for an inferior product specifically because EU wanted a slightly juicier import tariff. It's cases like this I'm sympathetic to my more libertarian countrymen. Who genuinely thinks the consumer is better off because of these 'protections'?
But why are there such high import duties for something they don't even manufacture? There's no domestic industry to give an advantage to through this.
Well, there is ARRI although I doubt all their parts are locally-sourced :D
> The Commission is not aware of technical limitations to those devices developed by the industry to evade import duties.
Maybe they should read Hacker News.
Some still cameras with video features also do actually lack in heat dissipation department and may really shut down because they overheat. Sometimes earlier than said 30 minute limit kicks in.
And say you use slow memory card in your otherwise capable camera... I have one here, which is allowing me to capture, depending on subject, 4-15 seconds of video. It just cant write stuff onto memory card fast enough and fills its memory buffer and then its done. With proper fast flash card, same camera runs up to 29:59 and with certain tweaks, until flash card is full.
Some of the first Canon DSLRs that did video had a 5 minute limit. On the one hand, I guess they didn't want to cannibalize their video camera offerings but on the other they did actually get very noticeably hot.
The question is based on a misconception. Here's what my particular camera can do, the Fujifilm X-T5, from dpreview.com:
"Fujifilm says the camera can shoot 6.2K/30 video for 90 minutes or 4K/60p for 60 minutes at 25°C (77°F); these numbers drop significantly at higher temperatures, and there's no option to add a fan to compensate."
Here's what the next more expensive, slightly bigger camera can do the Fujifilm X-h2, from Cameralabs.com
"Also inherited from the X-H2S is unlimited internal recording, sailing past the previous half hour limit and also without overheating issues in my tests. I made five separate recordings, each starting with a full battery, and was able to record between 100 and 120 minutes in any format from 1080 to 8k before the battery expired. In each case at the end of the recording, the camera had become very warm behind the screen, but showed no warning of overheating. Battery power was the limiting factor in these tests.
All my tests were made at room temperature in the UK, but if you’re filming under hotter conditions and experiencing overheating, you can extend your recording times by fitting an optional fan accessory. As seen here on the S version, this simply screws into the back of the body when the screen’s folded out – not particularly elegant, but it will extend your times."
It seems to me it's clearly an issue of heat management in a small form factor since an optional fan accessory extends the film length in the higher end camera.
It’s definitely not universal.
A few years back I had a Sony DSC-HX90V (basically their best compact camera), purchased in Australia, that was capped at 20 minutes. (I discovered this by losing most of an hour-long session. I don’t believe this limitation was documented, as I did read its manual and would expect to have remembered that.)
I understand the Sony α6000 generation (mirrorless; α6000, α6300, α6500) had a mixture of limitations: in many situations, around a 20 minute cap due to file system or file format limits, thermal limits that would often shut it down well before that, and a hard limit of “approximately 29 minutes” for unstated reasons I will not speculate on.
The α6100 generation (α6100, α6400, α6600) lacks all these limitations. I purchased one in India. Its battery allows it to record for around 80 minutes, and with power via Micro-USB I’ve recorded for 100 minutes in an ambient temperature of over 40°C on multiple occasions, and five hours once for a test.
Heat management, the EU import tax, all of those are certainly small factors. But the main reason is absolutely market segmentation: if you want to record "professional" video content, better buy a professional video camera for a higher price. It's that simple.
Heat buildup cause a lot of noise to appear in the image.
New cameras are overcoming this with fans. Look at the just realeased Sony fx30 or the Panasonic S5ii. Both have built in fans to aid in cooling getting them unlimited record times.
I shoot with a sigma FP that has no recording limit and no fan. It is designed as basically a giant heat sink. It also has some of the lowest amounts of noise of any camera.
I’m sure the eu thing comes into play in hitting that 30 minute mark but it’s probably a convenient choice of time limit when solving the heat buildup issue.
FWIW I’ve followed film cameras closely for years and have never heard of this EU law while all reviews etc talk about heat buildup because it is so detrimental to image quality.
Lots of the comments here get at the reason, which is import taxes, but there's confusion about the impact of it on the high-end camera market. Most professional setups that use "still" cameras are running them into a video mixer (like Blackmagic ATEM) which connects to a computer. You can record directly onto disk and stream live at the same time using free software like OBS. The camera just sits with its shutter open but doesn't record anything, thus there's no time limit. The Sony A7 series is quite popular for this application. What I'm describing is kind of the tip of the iceberg in terms of video capture complexity.
EU tax for videocameras vs still cameras
Though I wonder who needs to record more than 30 minutes in one take? Seems like extremely niche scenario even with videocameras.
I remember Ukraine or Russia had for many years even crazier tax on cars which were improted partially disassembled and then assembled locally to avoid much higher import tax on completely assembled car, but can't find it now. Seems it was scratched after they joined WTO,m before there was like 30% import tax on cars.
recording longer than 30min is primarily for if you're recording an event (longer than 30min, like a sports match) and being able to leave the camera in a fixed location without having to go back and forth
Not all cameras stop recording after 30 minutes. That's a topic for camera reviews.
Can't you still grab the HDMI signal without such limitation?
If the camera outputs clean HDMI, yes.
I was wondering if that too would switch off after 30 minutes
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The fact is when you are recording a good quality video you never go over a few minutes of recording. So usually it doesn't bother film makers too much.
If you're recording a live opera it's a problem but then you usually have much higher quality gear without the limitations of a DSLR.
> The fact is when you are recording a good quality video you never go over a few minutes of recording
I've made home sex tapes longer than 30 minutes, imagine stopping in the middle to start a new file on the camera! Or imagine someone filming the birth of their child and failing to capture it because the camera timed out at an inopportune moment.
> I've made home sex tapes longer than 30 minutes
No need to brag.
What if you are recording a conference or a lecture? May easily go over 30 minutes; does not always need theatrical quality.
You probably want to consider live streaming the event which means using something with clean HDMI out or a USB webcam mode, along with a dedicated capture device/computer. At that point you can just dump a recording of any size to disk.
Use a $500 video camera rather than a $5,000 DSLR setup?
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