Different cameras have different battery usage. Depending on make, some cameras may last longer than others. Depending on the make, some batteries may last longer than others. It’s tempting, when buying a camera, to buy cheaper third party batteries which can be less than half the price but in my experience, they usually fall well short of the recording time your camera manual is telling you for the official battery. It’s also possible you may also forget to charge it fully before use.
Also resolution and frame rates will have an effect on batteries. For instance, I would expect a 1080p output at 30FPS to outlast 4k@60FPS. It’s also highly likely night vision is also an additional drain on the battery. Full avi, H264 or H265 or other formats may also give different recording times.
Temperature also has an effect on battery life. It’s possible that what you’ve filmed at a summer wedding will last longer than a cold, damp cellar on a winter’s evening.
I’ve said before that investigators should test their kit and benchmark under normal conditions. Test a fully charged battery and film the goldfish in your unhaunted house. See how long the movie is and how long the battery lasts.
Test it again in a cold room at night. See if there’s a difference.
Check all the batteries are registering full power at the top of an investigation.
Make a note of who’s recording what format and what resolution.
To sum up. If ghost hunters can’t be bothered to investigate the limitations of their own kit, how are we to believe anything about their findings?
Bang on with all of that .. and to add, not all investigators are aware of this but if you have a mobile phone on you and it's on flight mode, it
will affect EMF meters .. so make sure all team members phones aren't on flight mode or more ideally switched off completely.
We're (our team) all very aware that if we go to a location that's said to be haunted, that looks spooky and we were to just be waving gadgets around and letting our imaginations get away with us (and any ghost investigator who denies these point is, well, in denial .. or frauds just after youtube 'likes') .. we're aware that we won't be taken seriously.
.. and then there's massive sceptics who refuse any evidence put in front of them, no matter how methodical and organised a ghost team has been. I could even join in if I felt like it and quite correctly point out that a team member might be a ventriloquist which would neatly explain away every disembodied voice ever heard by any ghost team ever.
A funny example happened during our second visit to All Saints Church in Santon .. I was outside in the graveyard with another team member when two other team members exited the church and one told us she had just heard a woman scream outside which was backed by the other team member who said he'd also heard it. Eddie Mallet (team member with me outside) reminded them that we were also a few hundred metres from a dogging site ..
(for any non UK forum members that might not know the term 'dogging', it's a place where strangers meet up in secluded areas in cars to have sex with each other etc) ..
.. but then if myself and Eddie were outside, why didn't we hear the scream?
.. a more interesting one was when a different team's camera was physically switched off in the same location at a different date .. not a battery drain but a button that had been manually depressed to the off position. His footage was recording and nobody was near his camera for the duration of the filming which could be illustrated by multi camera footage and later analysis of his camera's stored information. Luke Tabram from Shadow Paranormal.
