I finally pulled the trigger on the GH6 after months of debating but man the hidden costs are seriously killing me right now. Im heading out to do a documentary shoot in rural Oregon in like three weeks and I am realizing I have almost nothing ready to actually make this thing work for long days in the field. The battery life is honestly kind of a joke compared to my old G9 so I am stuck between two paths for power and cant decide which is less of a headache.

I am basically torn between these setups:

• Going the SmallRig V-mount battery route with a dummy battery and a cage
• Just biting the bullet and buying like six or seven of the official Panasonic DMW-BLK22 spares

The V-mount feels more professional and reliable for long takes but it adds so much damn weight to the rig and I am gonna be hiking a lot through some rough terrain. On the other hand swapping batteries every 40 minutes sounds like a total nightmare when I am trying to capture natural moments without stopping.

Then there is the storage situation because shooting 5.7K ProRes is the whole reason I bought this beast but those CFexpress Type B cards are priced like gold bars. I am looking at the Delkin Black 512GB because everyone says it is the most stable but the ProGrade Digital Gold 1TB is on sale and the extra space would be huge for a week-long trip. But then I read some forum post saying the ProGrade cards get heat errors in the GH6 during long recording sessions and now I am paranoid.

My budget is strictly $800 left for all the accessories because the camera body and the 12-60mm lens already cleared me out. I need this to be a rock solid setup because I wont have easy access to power or a computer to offload footage every night. Should I prioritize the expensive high-speed media or the power solution first? Is the SSD mount via USB-C actually a viable way to work or is it just gonna dangle off the side and break? I am so frustrated with how much extra gear you need just to get the advertised features working properly without the thing dying...