Philip Howells
June 7th, 2011, 12:57 AM
We bought four of these almost as soon as they were available - a couple of days before an event shoot. The unit has a confusing and pretty useless red LED indicator.
It's confusing because it doesn't indicate that the camera is recording but merely that the unit is plugged into the camera and the camera is powered up and available to record.
It's useless because there seems little value in knowing the remote is plugged in when a gentle flick of the zoom control will confirm that.
As a result of the confusion one of our cameramen inadvertently missed 10 minutes of an event. With practice and familiarity (of which we had time for neither before the job) he won't do it again of course.
However, so easy is it to change the record state we've added a miniature toggle switch which isolates the record start stop function of the remote. Since we do most of our work as three cameras running for multicam editing, once the cameras are started flicking this switch means the recording can't be interrupted by fewer than two actions.
The saddest part of this tale is that a message to Manfrotto in London commenting on the confusing design was given the bum's rush. Apparently the "Customer Service" people (an oxymoron if ever there was one) are there to deflect suggestions or comments not to pass them on to the designers who, one hopes, would be interested in making a better product.
If anyone wants the details of the modification and the wiring let me know by PM.
It's confusing because it doesn't indicate that the camera is recording but merely that the unit is plugged into the camera and the camera is powered up and available to record.
It's useless because there seems little value in knowing the remote is plugged in when a gentle flick of the zoom control will confirm that.
As a result of the confusion one of our cameramen inadvertently missed 10 minutes of an event. With practice and familiarity (of which we had time for neither before the job) he won't do it again of course.
However, so easy is it to change the record state we've added a miniature toggle switch which isolates the record start stop function of the remote. Since we do most of our work as three cameras running for multicam editing, once the cameras are started flicking this switch means the recording can't be interrupted by fewer than two actions.
The saddest part of this tale is that a message to Manfrotto in London commenting on the confusing design was given the bum's rush. Apparently the "Customer Service" people (an oxymoron if ever there was one) are there to deflect suggestions or comments not to pass them on to the designers who, one hopes, would be interested in making a better product.
If anyone wants the details of the modification and the wiring let me know by PM.