From the course: Video Gear

The Switronix Powerbase-70

From the course: Video Gear

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The Switronix Powerbase-70

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- Through the years, there's been a lot of different types of battery technology, and these larger capacity batteries have been used for professional gear for a long time. It used to be that you needed these giant batteries to power giant cameras, but now that we got smaller devices, they last even longer. - Well that's true, and of course we have, with smaller devices, smaller batteries that have less capacity and don't power the camera for as long. And obviously we've talked a lot about power options. This Atomos Power Station's a great one. But sort of a old trusty sidekick for me is this guy. This is the PB70 Powerbase Station from Switronix, and I was first introduced to this when I bought a Blackmagic Cinema Camera. Blackmagic Cinema Camera great camera, but has an internal non-removable battery, that it best lasts about 60 minutes or so. - Got to love that good design. - Yeah, so I needed some extra power, and this kind of was the going thing. And I've been extremely happy with it. But this is not a Blackmagic camera, how does this work? Well we have different regulator bases. This guy catches right here on the bottom. - Yep, it's a pretty firm attachment. - Yeah, it just attaches. This is the battery itself, which on something like Blackmagic Cinema Camera, is going to give you about four to six hours. Actually a little bit more on something smaller, like an a7 or an a7S. And the way that this guy works is that over here on this side, we just have a charger port, where you can actually charge this battery. On the other side, there's a little battery indicator to see how much charge you have. - And it's also a V-mount on this particular type of battery. So we have a Sony V-mount charger. We use a lot of V-mount batteries in some of our older style projection cameras. Just slide that in and it works. - Yep, and there's some thread mounts right here. And like I said, the regulator. Now this is the key part of this system. The battery itself is unchanging, but you need to get the regulator that's appropriate for your camera. And the regulator does a couple things. It adjusts the power flow, but also the other end, when it's connected to the camera, it also adjusts what that end is, whether it's just a regular sort of 12 volt style power adapter, or whether it's something like that. - And with this type of battery, this one's designed particularly for the Atomos disk recorder. So I can just take that, and connect that, and go ahead and connect your end. - Yep, and it's just these pins. You've got to just line those pins up, and then kind of just firmly press on, just like that. - All right, and let's at least do the test to make sure that it does indeed work. We'll power that up, battery's on in your end, right? - Yep. - Gives it a second. There we go. Power it up. Let's just lock that off. You see it's turning on, takes a second for the disk recorder to go through its boot cycle, but now it's launched, and that's a significantly larger capacity battery. - And you're right, Rich, right using a mount on the back of the camera rig here. We just have a cheese plate with our adapter here. And I'll simply just take that guy, put it in, and we're mounted. - Yeah, so higher capacity battery, professional mounting point, with the flexibility to swap out the bottom. Highly recommend this system, particularly if you've made an investment in these batteries, it makes it easy to move them between cameras.

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