Hey guys, I'm a relatively new M5 owner, and had a weird experience on a shoot the other day where the Movi was completely unresponsive despite allegedly being connected to the app. Batteries were good, cables were good. Load was fine (A7s+ small EF prime.) It had worked fine on its previous outing, and tested yesterday back in the office without changing anything at all, it powered up and worked fine. The day I had the problem, the 3 lights initially came on and then went off - they weren't doing the flashing thing indicating a problem. I was trying to connect via my phone's bluetooth (it doesn't seem to communicate over wifi on my Google Pixel), and when that didn't work we tried the wifi on my DP's iPhone. Nothing doing there either. I could see the Movi in my selected devices list, and was getting the 'attempting to connect' message, then nothing. No error warnings at all. The only unusual message was something like 'wifi has no internet access'. We were shooting inside a bar and my phone wasn't on the bar's wifi, and I don't think it had a 4G signal either. Would this explain why the Movi wouldn't respond at the location, and then worked perfectly back in the office? Obviously not happy at all about a completely non-functional piece of equipment on a paid shoot. Pretty embarrassing in front of the client. There was a lot to get through and we ended up having to go handheld instead as there wasn't the time to spend figuring it out. Is there a troubleshooting step I missed? Something else I could've/should've done?
Hi Neil, I had a similar issue with the M15 once, and it went away at the end of the day, but we could connect to the Movi via Android bluetooth and were getting Boot errors. We switched Motion Booting on and the gimbal woke up, and got through the day. Then of course, after contacting Support and they requested a video of the problem, I couldn't replicate it. Once or twice, I couldn't get the Movi to boot, and so I checked all the cable connections, up under the covers, and made sure they were pressed in. I clearly remember a shoot where it woke up after doing that.
Hi Graham, Yeah, on another shoot it was connecting but not getting power to one of the motors. Fortunately on that occasion, we discovered pretty quickly it was a loose connection and as soon as we pushed the cable all the way in, it worked fine. As for the problem I originally posted about, who knows what the cause was! Would be great to know all the troubleshooting steps for a scenario like that. And if it happens again, I'll make sure to film it to post to Freefly!