D800 LCD Timeout when filming

Wingston

Is this supposed to happen? I left my D800 filming whilst on another camera and when I returned the screen had gone off. As I thought their was a break in the footage I formatted it without checking if it had actually stopped filming. Anyone know if the screen times out? Can't find a setting.

Ironheart

All DSLRs from all manufacturers only film for 29minutes 59seconds to get around bull$h!t EU tariff laws that classify anything longer than 30min as a video recorder (think TV programs) and jack up the tax. We all suffer. The way around that is to use an external video recorder, like a ninja2:

You will want to do this anyway for better quality. The other way is to hack the firmware, see the nikonhacker project:
https://nikonhacker.com/
Cannon has a similar program called magiclantern
I should point out that DSLRs from all manufacturers have a max 4GB per file limitation due to the FAT32 filesystem they all use. Some can span files, but usually problems ensue. That drives you right back to an external recorder.