Venice 2 Power Supply Considerations

[LensMeAHand]

 

Earlier this week, I was using a Venice 2 to shoot on a stage, and of course, when you know the camera won’t move more than 10ft in the course of a day, it’s much more convenient to use a power supply than to constantly swap batteries. Unfortunately, the company that rented us the Venice 2 forgot to include an AC adapter to power the camera from the wall. So I grabbed the power supply from a Blackmagic 12K, thinking it would work. It did not. Here’s the interesting part:

The Venice 2 manual gives three different power ratings for the 8K camera:

Unit nominal power consumption: 76W

Nominal meaning the smallest amount it could possibly consume, which is irrelevant for our purposes

Unit maximum power consumption: 100W

The maximum power the camera body alone could consume

Total maximum power consumption: 220W

The total consumption of the camera body plus all the accessories and gadgets that could be drawing power from it

The Blackmagic 12K power supply outputs 12 V at 8.33 A. Using Ohm’s law (Watts = Volts * Amps), we can determine that the Blackmagic power supply delivers 100 W of power. However, this was not enough for our Venice 2 with only a viewfinder attached. We weren’t even recording. We simply powered the camera on (with batteries and power supply connected) and watched the voltage drain as the power supply got really hot.

The moral of this story is that you should make sure that your Venice 2 power supply can deliver at least 220 W, or else you risk losing power during your shoot.

[alisterchapman]

Quite possibly the issue was that 12v is a bit on the low side. The specs are 11v to 17v, but ideally the camera wants 13.8v to around 15v or 24v/28v.  At 12v even the slightest voltage sag in any of the connecting cables will cause the voltage at the camera to drop too low. Given the high current draw some voltage sag is inevitable even with good quality cables.

 

I regularly power Venice using a 13.8V 100w power supply without issue, but you must ensure the DC cables are of suitably high quality and actually capable of carrying at least 8 amps.