Originally posted by Rondec I think Madbrain plays Classical Piano and wants to record whole pieces with several devices at the same time without breaks. The 15 minute limit probably is pretty short depending on the piece of music he is filming.
Yes, piano and harpsichord. My audio is continuous and separately recorded.
Since I'm an amateur musician , it takes me quite a lot of takes until I get a good one.
Even though I never play any single piece >15 minutes, my workflow is such that I wouldn't want to stop the video recording after the end of each bad take. I might end up going to my remote control a few dozen or hundred times.
I prefer to have the video going indefinitely, just like the audio. I only stop the recording once I know I have a good take. I only stop the video with the remote, to mark the end of the good take.
The camcorder splits video in files of 2GB max each - so I look for the good take in any files that are <2GB . If I had to stop the recording for every bad take, I would have dozens or hundreds of video files of varied sizes, and would not know which ones are good or bad without reviewing all of them. That would be nightmarish as I don't want to go to the PC to save the file in the middle of my playing/recording session.
Sometimes I will do 2+ hours of recording at a time without stopping either the camera or the audio (even I take a bathroom break, I just leave the room and come back) . I don't want the tools to get in the way and it's much easier this way.
It especially becomes impossible to deal with if want to use more than one camera - that really multiplies the video files, if all the cameras cannot record continuously. I have not done that too much due to the fact that the camcorder is my only continuous camera. Everything else (Pentax, smartphone) has some sort of time limit in it which makes it impractical.
I have done it a little bit, but it's really hard to edit, even if I manage to get a decent take that completes within the shorter of all the cameras limits involved.
The HG21 camcorder has the ability to record without a limit; well up to the size of the max 32GB SDHC card.It splits into separate files every 2GB, but the software can handle it without dropped frames. I have actually hit the 32GB SDHC card limit in one session at a time before when I forgot to reformat the card at the beginning of my session.
For audio, I never run out of space as the PC that's recording it has many TB of disk space, and it could record for many days at a time. 32GB SDHC card means about 3 hours of HD in one shoot at 24 Mbps bit rate on my HG21 camcorder. I use a UHS-I card that's 95MB/s and can transfer the whole card to PC very quickly. But usually, I just transfer the most recent few files (most recent takes). Not always, sometimes I'm lucky enough to have more than 1 good take to review in 2 hours, so I do transfer the whole card
The camcorder also has an internal 120GB HDD, but it would be extremely painful to transfer to PC over USB 2.0 speeds, much slower than the SD card. And I would have to take the camcorder off its tripod when I go to the PC. Much better to use the SD card.
Incidently, I just did the math on the GH5 - at the 400 Mbps rate, it will use 180GB/hour of video. 2 hour video would need a 512GB SDXC V60 card, which doesn't exist yet. 256GB V60 cards cost $200.
Since the GH5 has USB 3.1 and tethering, I wonder why Panasonic didn't allow recording video to PC directly via USB . That would solve the expensive card problem for me. I would just need some good USB 3.x repeating gear for the 50ft needed to my desktop in the next room (that's how long my 12 XLR snake cable is). Might be complicated firmware and software to write.
Or maybe just allow recording to external USB 3.x HDD / SSD, that's probably a lot simpler to implement - only firmware to write, no PC/Mac host software, and no need for USB 3 repeater.
Anyway, if I get the GH5, I can probably use a slower than 400 Mbit rate to begin with, until those large V60 cards come down in price. It can still do 4K/60 with my existing U3 cards at lower bit rate.
TLDR
Camera with no time limit allows me to record and publish stuff that I am not good enough to ever be able to play live in one take. Cameras with time limits get in the way.