Ask HN: Why do cameras stop recording after 30 minutes? | Hacker News Reader

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

42 pointspramaanik67 comments

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?

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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.

RE>> Because "yeah, that's a slipper" doesn't pass muster.

[Justice Potter Stewart has entered the chat]: "I know it when I see it". "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

> It's the impetus behind the question "Is a hotdog a sandwich?"

It seems like that's the "every hot-dog is a sandwich but not every sandwich is a hot dog" thing

> What's the line between pasta and bread?

Leaveners

> Bread and cake?

Sugar content

But I think question here is why products for such similar use have such different taxation ? Why video is taxed more than pictures ? What purpose does it serve?

There's unleavened bread. There's both breads with higher sugar content and cakes with lower sugar content.

The point is that it really is just our vague impressions of things. Taxonomy has the impossible task of defining things that really don't have clear definitions. When does a table become a chair? Etc.

Why do you think a hot dog is a sandwich? Does that make a taco a sandwich? If not, why aren't hot dogs tacos? Is a Pop Tart a ravioli?

> There's unleavened bread.

Yeah for bread vs pasta the "you need to boil the dry pasta and bake/fry the bread dough is better selector I admit. If you bake dry pasta it won't go well

> Why do you think a hot dog is a sandwich?

Bread, stuff, bread

> Does that make a taco a sandwich?

Yes

> If not, why aren't hot dogs tacos?

They are different kinds on sandwich family tree. Calzone is a pie just like pizza

> Is a Pop Tart a ravioli?

Never eaten that abomination in my life but it has no pasta in it so no

Feel free to ask if you have any other doubts.

Re >> Feel free to ask if you have any other doubts. -- Well, since you offered...

If a calzone is a pie, is a hot pocket a pie? Would that make a pop-tart a smaller fruit pie?

If a taco is a sandwich, does that make taquitos (rolled tacos) sandwiches? If taquitos are sandwiches, are eggrolls? What about burritos?

Is bannana bread a cake?

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.

...Why would they tax extra ones with smaller memory ? Was there actual reason specified somewhere ?

It's said that the tax was for every computing machine but big companies pressured the government to remove it and what the government did was only tax microcomputers and not systems like mainframes and such.

The computer with the 72KB was the Amstrad CPC472

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC#CPC472

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.

Bricking up your windows to own the Liberals.

(You can still see this on old buildings, some were never restored to use as windows)

> to own the Liberals

Sometimes it is actually a matter of principle. Not everything revolves around us-vs-them politics, and it would be a disservice to our understanding of others to paint it as such.

You have it completely backwards. They were the liberals.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

There are so many different ones already that one more doesn't matter very much. If you are a poor country getting rid of them matters, but UK is rich/important enough that plenty of companies will find it worthwhile to navigate and so they don't loose much. Poor countries are a small market and so if it hard to navigate companies will give up as there are not enough rich people there to be worth the effort, and so banding together means your rich are combined with the rich in other poor countries and so it is more likely that you have enough that it is worth navigating the regulations.

Don't get me wrong, Brexit was a bad thing. My reply is strictly about things that are made by large companies outside of Europe. Skip any of those qualifiers and things change.

Ok but for large companies regulations are very rarely munch of an inconvenience anyway, with a very few exceptions (many of those are in fact EU regulations that actually benefit the consumer). They have the manpower to deal with it and often the pull to influence regulation.

Generally it’s individuals and small to medium sized companies both inside and outside the UK that are negatively affected by Brexit.

Because you really want to record movies longer than 30 minutes on your phone?

Not even sure if the UK has changed this already.

I really want technology to be as good as it gets, not as good as tax/tariff law allows.

The tax/tariff laws might dictate 30 minutes; however, in this case, it is also a practical limit for recording on your phone. Manufacturers need to set some boundaries in case someone is making a pocket recording that potentially could fill up the storage, drain the battery, and crash the device. If you want to record more than 30 minutes, you are better off buying recording equipment.

And what's the current UK import duty on camcorders?

Looks like 0% for all items under 8525 under the new Global Tariff (i.e for countries with which the UK trades under WTO terms). It would be 0% for countries with an FTA as well, of course:

https://www.trade-tariff.service.gov.uk/headings/8525

The distinction in law between sub-30 and 30+ minutes still exists, inherited from EU law, but the tariff is 0% in both cases:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/classifying-electrical-equipment...

Summary of the changes from the "Common External Tariff" of the EU to the "UK Global Tariff":

"The net effect of the tariff regime according to a summary by the Department for International Trade is as follows:

- 47% of products will be tariff-free, compared to 27% under the CET and

- Average tariffs will be reduced from 7.2% under the CET to 5.7% under the UKGT

This is achieved through changes to rates of tariff by lowering rates, reducing rates to zero or rounding rates down."

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

It's a heat management issue, I recall from a review of a new Fujifilm device that with an external recorder Fujifilm devices can go unlimited.

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?

5,000$ DSLR’s take better video than $500 video cameras.

So I think it’s just price discrimination. They want people to buy 50,000$ video cameras not 5,000$ DSLR’s.

Fwiw, Sony's current mid-to-high end a7 line of mirrorless cameras (eg: the a7 IV) don't have this video recording limit. They also handle long recordings fine assuming it's on a tripod and screen is in the flipped out position[1] (the link ran a capture at 4K/60fps for 3 hours before ending the test arbitrarily).

[1] @2:50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9GHftTU7fE

$5000 DSLRs have huge APSC/Full frame sensors to try and cool... try and take a bulb mode shot on one and let me know if they let you past 30 minutes.

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