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I have used my Canon 500D to shoot general video that doesn't need the manual settings but sometimes come up with a problem. Came up today. Sometimes when shooting video, the video will only record for a few seconds then stop. My camera said it can hold 15 minutes of video on my card, but when I got to shoot the video I only get (at best) 12 seconds of video and no idea why. The odd thing is that the camera shoots the video longer with the lens cap on, but when I take it off, the video stops at either 9 or 12 seconds. Anyone know the cause or how to avoid this?

Some DSLRs overheat if shooting long video sequences and shut themselves down. This should be after tens of minutes rather than seconds though. Did the camera feel particularly warm? Does it apply at all resolutions or only at high res (e.g. 1080p if the 500D does that)?

The overheat theory could be supported by the lens cap on / off aspect: The processor probably works harder compressing real images than all-black frames. But it certainly shouldn't overheat after a few seconds (unless you'd already been shooting long sequences immediately before).

Is your memory card class 6 or higher? It's possible that recording has stopped because data can't be written to the card quickly enough.

With the lens cap on there's far less data to be written to the card, which would explain why the recording doesn't stop so soon.

Paul

I have a scandisk extreme III 16GB card. The camera didn't overheat due to only using it there and then. I'll try clearing the card and formatting it and trying again, maybe that was the problem, although it said 15minutes free shooting on 1080p HD, suppose there wasn't enough memory to record that? I also have a few other SD cards I'll try and see what happens.