Spare battery
Also known as: extra battery, battery spare
An additional camera pack carried so recording continues past the point where the first one is empty, which arrives sooner than people expect.
Updated
What it means
A spare battery is the difference between a session and part of one. Action cameras recording at high specifications run for a fraction of a day, so the number of packs sets how long filming can last.
It is a planning item rather than an accessory. Deciding how many to carry is the same calculation as deciding how much footage the day is meant to produce.
The arithmetic shifts sharply in the cold, where capacity falls rather than the battery failing. Cold-weather battery life means a winter session needs more packs than the summer figure suggests.
How it works in practice
Carrying them warm is as important as carrying them charged. An inside pocket keeps a pack near body temperature, and swapping a warm one in restores full performance immediately.
Labelling matters once there are several, because an unlabelled handful makes charged and flat indistinguishable without testing each one in the camera.
Swapping early rather than running a pack flat avoids the other failure, since a camera that dies mid recording leaves an unfinalised file rather than a complete short one. A Battery life indicator on an ageing pack is also optimistic rather than accurate.
What to watch out for
Packs age at different rates, so an older one in a set quietly becomes the first to die and gets blamed on the camera rather than on itself. Retiring it is cheaper than losing a session to it.
Third party cells vary in both capacity and behaviour, and one that reports a charge it cannot deliver produces exactly the sudden shutdown a Camera crash file follows from.
Charging a cold pack damages it, so warming before charging is part of the routine rather than an optional refinement, whatever a Dual battery charger accepts without complaint.
How RawClip handles it
A session filmed across several battery swaps arrives as many separate files rather than a few long ones, which is the normal case. Clips are reassembled by timestamp, so the swaps are invisible in the finished highlight and a day split across six packs reads as one continuous session.