[Dan Geller]

I spent time on the phone with DOT folks when the rule first came out. They heard from quite a few video folks and clarified the language a bit.

Here is what is supposed to be the real deal: no checked luggage lithium-ion batteries unless they are attached to the camera (attaching to a charger doesn’t count), and for carry-on as many lithium-ion batteries as you want if each single battery contains under 8 grams of lithium (all IDX batteries). If you have a battery that contains between 8 and 25 grams of lithium, then you are allowed two of those “medium batteries” for carry-on in addition to all the others below the 8 gram limit you are carrying on. The catch is that for “medium” batteries the rule aggregates the lithium content across all you “medium” batteries for a total of 25 grams of allowed medium battery carry-on. Again, this has no bearing at all on the “small” or under 8 grams each battery. You could carry on 6 IDX E10 batteries as well a two more medium batteries that had, say, 10 grams of lithium each.

It does help to put tape over the contacts or to put each battery in its own plastic bag. The big concern is shorting out of contacts again metal or each other and a fire.

IDX published a PDF file stating the lithium content of all their batteries and also stating the rule, which can come in handy if a TSA agent challenges you.

–Dan

[Dan Geller]

I wish the 3000 had tape built in as well as P2. Tape is king for long-form work, field documentary work, work that a client needs in hand to take away. Hard drives fail – even just sitting on the shelf. We do ingest everything to Rorke HDX arrays, so that’s great for redundant and fast near-term storage. For studio long-term archiving, we have LTO3, but that’s a clumsy way to create a non-flash based near-term asset.

Yes – having a Panny deck or Kona card up/down/cross convert in realtime is also a huge advantage. P2 and other flash media could be fine if prices drop drastically so that it becomes the equivalent of tape – write once, never record over it. I see why news stations like P2 because they often do record over their tapes and are dumping daily to NLEs. I see why feature film sets can deal with flash recording because they have the budgets for an IT person to be shuffling and archiving on set or overnight. But for the many, many of us in documentary production we don’t want to shoot all day only to stay up all night getting data off cards to drives or tapes. And for corporate productions, where footage often needs to go to a post-house right after the shoot – tape again makes more sense.

That’s why we’re shooting our current documentary on the HDX900 – renting it – and have delayed our Red order and not jumped at the Panny 3000 either. If Flash gets super cheap, then tape can be proclaimed as dead for field acquisition – though not for archiving (LTO3/4, etc.)