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Comment by codys | Hacker News Reader

That's a great point, and shows up in annoying ways in Sony's camera line up in whether "high frame rate" support exists. For Sony cameras, HFR implies "can capture a limited length (seconds, typically) of footage at a higher frame rate (240fps, 480fps, 960fps, etc) and reduced resolution as frame rate increases (this is not the same as normal video modes and S&Q video modes, which don't have time limits like these).

Sony includes this feature on cameras without interchangeable lenses (ie: "point and shoots"), and on their high end cinema cameras, but not on their mirrorless (interchangeable lens, but not considered cinema cameras) line.

Seems pretty clear this is designed to avoid their mirrorless lineup have a feature that might make it competitive with their cinema line. But they're ok including it on the point and shoot line because that already is well differentiated from the cinema camera line.

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I've always given benefit of the doubt that the limited duration of S&Q modes in stills cameras is related to the max throughput of the recording media. 120+fps at 4K resolution starts demanding quite a bit of sustainable bandwidth. Shooting to SD cards might be a limitation and explains why the pro-video cameras have much more expensive record formats.

Is there any chance that some of this limiting has legitimate hardware reasons?

It's been over a decade since I really followed the digital camera scene.

At the time, DSLRs were just beginning to get 1080p/720p video capabilities. There were frustrating time limits of course, even then. But, I recall that some of the cameras heated up pretty significantly when capturing video. This was sometimes cited as a reason for such time limitations on video recording.

I'm not sure if that is possibly a "legitimate" physical reason for the limitation today, or if it ever was in the first place. Any thoughts on that?

It still is, and I think its legitimate still - the R5 can record 8K video but of course real time encoding of that is going to generate a lot of heat.

A Cinema body has a lot more room for heat sinks, and can more easily accommodate fans - you're a lot more likely to be using an off-body mic on the cinema body. And then you have a larger battery for the chips and recording time.

>A Cinema body has a lot more room for heat sinks, and can more easily accommodate fans

And yet, you'll still see cameras on hot sets with bags of ice around them because these heat sinks and fans cannot keep up. The original Red One was notorius for overheating. I have BMD Ursa Mini that was struggling in 105 degree temps. Big body does not mean over heating is solved. Personally, the camera that I've used that best handled heat was Sony's F55. Shooting interior of an old van with sun beating down through a window in the roof directly on the camera, 110 degrees inside the van (yes it was miserable), and the camera never once complained (unlike the cast&crew).

Don't forget about the old 4GB filesize limit of FAT formatted devices from those early cameras. That was the hard limit not time. They would say time because they knew the bit rate and how long 4GB was in runtime. It was fancy cameras that would hit 4GB, and create a new file. It was fancier editors that would recognize that it was meant to be one clip and import it that way. It was the less sophisticated that would force you to "stitch" it manually or work with multiple clips.

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