Camera overheating
Also known as: thermal shutdown, heat warning
A camera stopping or throttling because it has got too warm, which is the most common reason a long recording ends before anybody wanted it to.
Updated
What it means
Overheating is a consequence of physics rather than a defect. A sealed body with no fan, encoding high resolution video continuously, produces more heat than it can shed and eventually protects itself by stopping.
The symptoms escalate rather than arriving at once. A warning appears, frame rates may drop, and finally recording ends, which is why a session can be partly usable and partly missing.
It is distinct from Overheating as a general camera problem in that action bodies are designed around it: the thermal limit is a known operating boundary rather than a failure anybody can repair.
How it works in practice
Airflow is the lever that works. A camera in moving air runs far longer than the same camera on a tripod, which is why a static timelapse fails where a ride does not.
Lowering the recording specification helps directly. Dropping from the highest resolution and frame rate reduces the encoding load, and HyperView or similar wide modes are usually the most demanding.
Taking the housing off where water is not a risk makes a measurable difference, since a closed case is deliberately an insulator and traps everything the body is trying to shed.
What to watch out for
The recording that stops is the one nobody was watching. A camera left running on a mount shuts down silently, and the gap is discovered when the card is copied rather than on the day.
Batteries and heat interact badly too. A warm camera draws more and a nearly empty battery runs hotter, so Battery life and thermal limits fail together rather than independently.
Resuming after a shutdown often starts a new file with a new clock, which is a route to Audio drift and to a gap that is easy to miss when the clips are sorted by name.
How RawClip handles it
An upload is read as the set of files it actually contains rather than as a continuous session, so a thermal shutdown in the middle of a day produces a gap in the timeline rather than a failure. The surrounding clips are still analysed normally.