As a video shooter, I have needs and one of the big ones is power. Shooting 4K video and RAW video requires a LOT of juice and very often I am powering more than just a camera. I could have microphones that are pulling power from the camera battery. I could also have external monitors, recorders and lights.
Since I started shooting video, I just had separate batteries for each device, but for the longest time I’ve been eyeing up a V-Lock battery solution. What are V-Lock batteries (sometimes they are called V-Mount)? To put it simply they are very big batteries that you can normally plug more than one device into at a time. There are actually a few different kinds of these batteries and V-lock just refers to the mount they use. There is also Gold Mount. From what I can tell, there are not huge differences between these mounts and it comes down to personal preference as to which one you go with. It seems that Gold is widely used in the USA and V-mount used most other places.
Before I went with the V-lock batteries, I had found some pretty big Sony-style batteries that would power my Fs5 and FS7 for up to three or four hours at a time. They also had one d-tap connector on them so I could power my Shogun Inferno off the same battery. Pretty cool right? Well it would have been, except the Shogun is super power hungry and the battery went from 3-4 hours of use on just the camera to about 45 minutes powering the camera and the monitor. This was my biggest motivation of looking at bigger battery options. Another advantage of the Gold Mount and V-mount batteries is that they can be bigger and hold a whole lot more juice than most “standard batteries”. There are a few disadvantages here:
