Quick take: The Canon R5 C has terrible battery life, and big horizontal V-mount plates make a small camera bulky. The SmallRig 4064 compact V-mount plate solves that. It mounts a V-mount battery behind a caged camera, adjusts to keep cables off the eyepiece, folds small and has an Arca-Swiss base. It works with most small mirrorless cameras too.
My Event Rig
I was packing for World's Strongest Man, my third year in a row covering athletes for my client SBD Apparel, so I wanted to show the rig I use on the Canon R5 C at events like that.
The R5 C famously has terrible battery life. Before, I used a large horizontal V-mount plate from Tilta. Then filmmaker Cam Mackey put out a video showing how to build a compact rig that mounts a V-mount battery behind the camera, and it worked brilliantly. Check out his channel. If anyone deserves credit for solving this problem, it's him. I made a few tweaks, like adding an iFootage mini tripod base so I can set the camera down between events.
Batteries
Newer V-mount batteries have USB-C PD, so one battery powers the camera and the monitor. A 98Wh battery, the maximum you can generally fly with, gets me through about five or six hours, so two cover a day. I also carry 50Wh batteries, which give similar run time without a monitor and keep the footprint small in crowded places or when you don't want to draw attention.
The SmallRig 4064
SmallRig finally made a product for this, and it arrived hours before my flight. It's exactly what we'd been looking for:
Compact: it folds small enough to fit in a pocket, though you'll never put it there with a battery attached.
No custom base needed: before, you needed a built-up base to run a setup like this. Now I just drop the caged camera onto it and mount the V-mount.
Adjustable spacing: you can move the battery further back, so the power cable doesn't push into the eyepiece, which always bugged me.
Tilts: loosen it to drop the battery lower and free up the screen, which I'll do on a tripod.
Built-in Arca-Swiss plate: the most common mount for portable tripods, so it makes more sense than a Manfrotto plate here.
I initially thought the bump on the plate was a design mistake for the R5 C, but it extends. I was the one who was wrong.
Using It With Older Cages
It also comes with a somewhat proprietary Arca-Swiss adapter plate and two screws. Newer SmallRig cages have built-in Arca plates that are open on the side, so they slide right in. Older cages, like my X-T3's, are closed on both ends and won't slide in. That's what the adapter is for: screw it to the cage, ideally with a quarter-turn adapter so one screw isn't the only thing holding it, and it works. It has safety stops too. That means you can bring this plate to whatever camera system you switch to later.
Old Rig vs New
The new setup is much thinner because you don't need the chunky base. For heavier lenses you still want rod support, which is where the 4064 alone falls short, so I'll keep my old base on my A camera and combine the two. For most of the week, though, the compact version on its own is about as portable as it gets.
If you don't own an iFootage mini tripod, it's one of the few purchases in my career that was definitely worth the money.
Final Thoughts
It took a while for a manufacturer to solve this, but it's a really well-designed product. Most small cameras like the FX3 have tolerable battery life, but for the R5 C, this is the fix. Years later I moved to a NEEWER V-mount and plate: see NEEWER perfected the mini V-mount camera rig.
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