7D Overheating

[Ian Withnall]

Mine's got the battery grip. We shot a doco with the 7D as second unit in Western Queensland in Australia. It was really hot, 7D only shut down from Overheating when using heaps of 50P. I religiously shut it down between takes. We sat it in the Land Rover with the AC on full before and during and it came good pretty quick!

Did a whole 32GB card worth of interviews in a lit room the other day and was fine!

Battery grip is a good investment. Lasts all day!

Cheers

[James Strange]

7d overheated at todays wedding for the 1st time since putting the new firmware on it.

temp icon came on 70 mins into the speeches (the speeches were 90 mins total)

cam didnt shut down, i turned it off for a bout 30 seconds at the end of each 12 min recording.

[James Dierx]

My 7d overheats all the time. Even in cool temperatures when I'm only shooting short clips. Hopefully Canon will fix this issue in their next camera.

[Andy Wilkinson]

Well, for the first time EVER my 7D showed the overheat icon today (after 8 months ownership - still on FW 1.09 that it came with, 16GB Sandisk UDMA card, hand held 1080p25 with 17-55 Canon lens, IS on and Canon battery). My assistant/helper was shooting some outside shots of a factory near Bedford whilst I was inside shooting interviews on the EX3 and after he'd been about 30 minutes out in the midday sun (on what was probably one of the hottest days we've had in England this year = 30C and muggy) it finally popped up!

Ah well, there was me thinking I'd got a one in a million special edition supercool 7D.

No worries though, he just turned it off for a few minutes and we continued working until mid-afternoon with no further problems...except that by then MY overheat icon also got activated! (....soon rectified by a couple of swift cool pints in my local pub once I got back home tonight!)

[Robert Turchick]

Interesting tip for anyone with overheating. I have the t2i with battery grip and did a 5 hour shoot outdoors in a parking lot with temp at 110. Took all the normal steps (umbrellas, towel, shutting off between takes) but before each take strapped a fresh instant ice pack to the card side of the camera. A small Velcro cable tie attached to the top and bottom strap loops was all it took to hold the pack tight against the camera. NEVER saw the heat warning! Before trying this, the camera would overheat after an hour on a shoot indoors and that's even with shutting down between takes.
At $35 for a box of 70 packs, well worth giving it a try.

http://www.bydezignproducts.com/icepacks.html

[Caleb Reynolds]

Hello all. I just got done shooting a promo video for a client here in Austin. They wanted me to shoot with thier 7D. (Not sure why, we have a P2 we could've used)

I noticed that the camera would overheat when shooting sequences over 3 minutes or so in length. Does every one have this problem? How can I prevent it, in the case I use it again?

[Lance Watts]

I own four 7D's and only once have I seen the overheating warning - after the camera had been recording for hours in 105 degree, direct sun.

If your camera is overheating after 3 minutes, you may have a problem.

[Caleb Reynolds]

thanks! I'll let my client know. They have more work they want done in the future. And I love the depth of field you get with the 7D. I would like to use it again.

I don't know why my search didn't find this thread? I think this should be stickied

[Brian Luce]

My 7d has always overheated on extended shoots.
But today I was using a monitor, which of course disable the built in LCD. It didn't overheat despite repeated 9-10 takes. Perhaps not running the LCD keeps the camera just cool enough that the overheat warning doesn't come on?

Has anyone else noticed this?

[Martin Campbell]

I have the 7D and used it for filming speeches at the weekend there. I have upgraded the firmware on it so it is quite recent (will confirm later what version it is) but about 45 minutes in and I got the heating warning light on - firt time I've seen it. I've not recorded as long as that before continuously. Before I had recorded the speeches I had been doing other bits of filming, but the camera had been sitting for about 15 minutes beforehand so might have been slightly warm.

anyway, I really didn't expect this to happen since the firmware updates and nobody else appears to have reported this as a continuing problem. Has anyone else had this issue in recent months?

[James Strange]

I occasionaly see it at about an hour of continuous recording, only every now and then.

I have the most recent firmware (well, not the one that was released a few days ago, the one before that)

[Martin Campbell]

just checked - it's version 1.2.3 I have. Am surprised at that James as I thought that before the firmware was released to fix the overheat issue, it had a max record time of about 1 hour? In my case it was about 50 minutes. I wonder if changing to a fresh/cool battery would make any difference, or even a new card.

[Jim Greene]

Brian has the key to the overheating issue: the LCD. Yes, using a battery grip will help as the battery also gets hot, and sure ice packs will help, but it's the LCD that really contributes to the overheat-sensor going on. I know this because I believe the T2i is very similar to the 7D is far as overheating (unlike the 5D which rarely overheats). My T2i will overheat after 20-40 minutes of "continuous" running (manual restarts). Now I use the Magic Lantern for the T2i with the version that allows auto-restart as well as the ability to turn off the LCD while recording. Now I can record at least 80 minutes continuously (with 3 second gaps at restarts) and no overheating at all. This may change when the summer humidity increases, as humidity is also a major factor.

Anyway, if you can use an external monitor, this will turn off the LCD and this will minimize overheating for sure. I don't know if the camera needs the monitor or if just plugging in the HDMI cable will trigger to turn off the LCD, so that would be interesting and cheaper than needing a monitor.

[Per Johan Naesje]

I did find some interesting information in the exif data from the 7D some weeks ago. I´m not aware if this info show up in every program capable of showing exif data, but I downloaded a small program from App store named ExifExtreme. This is for Mac only and I´m not aware if it´s available for Win users.

This small program list a huge amount of information particularly from the .thm file. And one of this is the internal temperature inside the camera during recording.

It was just of luck I did find this information, as I am a wildlife photographer and I´m trying out the 7D for wildlife recording and analyzing the exif data back home is quite important to find out the best settings for different kind of shooting.

During this period I have mostly done shooting from a blind/hide out in the woodland. Morning/early day temperature has been quite cold (but for wildlife this is the best time of day for shooting!). Average air temperature has been 8-10 degree Celsius (46 - 50 F). During this period the internal temperature inside the 7D varied from 25 degree Celsius ( 77F) to 46 degree Celsius (almost 115 F!) which is quite much higher internal temperature than the surrounding air temperature!

I was quite shocked when I find that the difference in temperature was so high!

Note that I have not experienced any overheating warning from the 7D in this periode of testing.

I did various recording sequences in length from just 20-30 seconds and up to 12 minutes which is the limit for continuos recording in HD.
I recorded in 1080/25p and 720/60p mostly.
I found that the internal temperature increased slightly when recording in 720/60p but also in 1080/25p during long recording runs, temperature was quite high.

The camera was on between the period of recording, and I switched battery when the change battery icon appeared on the screen. 2-3 fully charged batteries was used every day (4-6 hours) during this test period.

My setup is tripod recording only. I use one original battery in the internal camera battery bin, but I use a external monitor via HDMI feed all the time, which turns off the 7D internal lcd screen.
I did use lots of different lenses, from a Sigma 30mm f/1.4, Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8, Canon 300mm f/4.0 and Canon 500mm f/4.5. The kind of lenses used had no influence on the internal temperature
I also used a external Røde mono mini shotgun, feeding the 7D via the 3.5mm mic input.


I do hope this information could help some of you with overheating problems. Maybe you could investigate your own exif data. It could be interesting to know when the internal temperature is high enough to trigger the overheating warning in the display!

[Mike Calla]

Mine overheated yesterday many times; i was viewing on the camera's lcd. I'll take the battery out, even for 1 or 2 minutes > shoot for 3 or 4 and it'll comes back on again. it wasn't even that hot, but it was humid, i think that does it!

I haven't noticed any pictures problems as a result.

Shooting with a monitor cures the problem for the most part.