This is my hotswap battery plate for RED V-Raptor solution! For a very long time I was looking for a good battery solution for my RED V-Raptor. I didn’t really like the shark fin options available on the market and got a little bit frustrated to be honest. Finally I found a solution which works fine for me.
What hotswap battery plate do I use on my RED V-Raptor?
As filming wildlife can be very battery consuming, I was looking into getting a good dual battery solution for my RED cameras. Sometimes the cameras run for a very long time and have plenty of accessories attached like electronic view finders (in my case a Zacuto Kameleon Pro), monitors (DSMC3 RED 7″ Monitor), power drive motors for big lenses like the Canon CN20, wireless image transmitter (DJI, Terradeck) and so on. All these need quite a bit of power!
Before I was just using single batteries. Even beeing 150wAh batteries, I could get rarely more than 1,5h of constant filming out of them. And every time the batteries ran out of power, I had to switch off the camera, change the battery and boot the camera up again. Which all takes plenty of time and you don’t want to be in a situation when you have some action going and you are out of battery!
RED V-Raptor v-mount design...
As mentioned before, there are special shark fin solutions on the market. Particularly designed for the RED V-Raptor. But somehow I didn’t like the look and design of it. As the v-mount on the back of the Raptor allows only batteries with a maximum width of 75mm and the fact that you need a bit of clearance between the v-mount of the Raptor and an adapter plate so you are not covering the outputs on the right side, options are limited.
The time when the Raptor was new on the market, there were no adapter plates other than the RED Power Plate available. But thank god this has changed over the years. I have found the high quality Micro Battery Plate Adapter for RED V-Raptor/Komodo X from Wooden Camera. This power adapter will give you enough clearance to your outputs. And on top you will get two d-tap connectors on the top.
I had seen the dual micro hotswap plate from Bebob (VMF-Vmicro2) and really like the quality of their products as I am using only Bebob batteries with my RED cameras. The hotswap plate comes with a battery charge indicator and another d-tap connector on the top.
Natural History Power Solution Set-up!
The set-up of the dual hotswap power solution for the RED V-Raptor is quite simple. First you need to put the Wooden Camera Micro Battery Plate Adapter on the v-mount of the RED V-Raptor. Then you have to attach the Bebob Vmicro Hotswap Plate to the Wooden Camera Micro Battery Adapter. After that, you can attach your micro batteries to the Vmicro2 and you are good to go.
Now you have not only extended your camera run-time by two, you also gained three more d-tap outputs for your accesoires and you can hotswap the batteries at any given time. This should give you in theorie an endless runtime for wildlife camerawork!
