Curious to know what your camera package is drawing and how long you can make it last? CinePower is a new free tool that lets you do just that.
The team behind CinePower have previous form for developing free tools that allow people to get their cinematic life that bit more organised. The same team developed G-Casper, the free, open-source, Google Sheet-based call sheet program that has probably saved the neck of more than one production professional in the last week alone.
CinePower comes from the same altruistic, pragmatic wheelhouse. It’s designed to allow you to avoid those situations where you show up on set with your great all-singing, all-dancing camera package only to find that the batteries give out after an hour. Or that there’s an annoying voltage issue with the batteries you took with you that scuppers everything.
The web-based tool lets you input the details of a relatively complex camera package, matching batteries and chargers. It will then automatically calculate the battery runtime of the entire package, as well as the total charging cycle time required.
Users can not only pick from a big selection of pre-vetted equipment and batteries, they can also input their custom equipment, batteries and chargers.
“As a special feature for real-world use, CinePower also lets the user adjust battery effectiveness - i.e. if they know that their batteries have lost efficiency due to frequent use or age, cold shooting environments, voltage transforms etcetera,” explains developer Tobias Deml from boutique rentals house Camera Rentals NYC.
“We have a roadmap of some more features - allowing users to save configurations, giving more granularity to the battery effectiveness slider, an approval process to permanently add popular equipment and more to come.”
Last but not least, there's also a comprehensive database that allows the user to compare cameras at what Deml characterises as a 30,000ft level.
All in all it’s a neat little tool that is getting some deserved worldwide love.