This "cheap" repair almost BROKE me. 

Moral of the story: If a connector on your expensive device breaks, disassemble the entire device and break several parts inside to make the repair cost worthwhile.

That stuff is so frustrating. I still remember in 2009 through 2013, every time I would search for a video on how to do something it would edit out all the parts that told you how to deal with it actually said it was going to tell you how to do in the title. So aggravating!

A tip that I picked up when doing some work for the BBC decades ago - Any lead, like you say, is going to break the socket when you constantly push the thing in and take it out. Something needs to change and you can't change the socket. So, have a short "extender" lead that is permanently plugged into it and is taped down to the body or something that is screwed into the body (such as the mount) so that the short length of cable and the plug are not moving around relative to each other. Then when something goes, it is going to be the socket on the relatively cheap extension cable that you plugged in and not the expensive camera. Just replace the cable.

Even if it was a shit show, I appreciate an accurate depiction of a repair being attempted well outside of someone's comfort zone and skill level. Very frequently, how-to videos are heavily edited and the person in charge of the repair doesn't tell you how many devices they screwed up over the years learning their profession. It gives me a better idea of whether or not a repair like this is even worth attempting. It also gives me a better understanding as to why these cameras are so goddamn expensive. The part count and internal complexity seems far beyond your average smartphone.

"I tried to save money. I failed HARD." Ah yes, the pleasures of owning a business.

Important time to point out that right to repair doesn’t just mean allowing you access to parts to repair your own devices, it also means allowing repair shops and trained individuals access to parts so they can repair your devices properly

1. Soldering connector back you can do without hotair. 2. Not sure what solder did you use but looks like non lead one. If you are beginner I would use lead because it is so much easier to work with. 3. Use desoldering pump for ground pins. Then you can just place connector in a correct spot and solder without hotair. Remeber that ground pin have a lot of thermal capacity so the moment you touch melted solder to it, temperature would drop and cause solder to go in to the solid state. Until you get back to melted point you will significantly heat the plastic in the connector. 4. If you see that your solder blobs are kinda crumbly and irregular, that usually means too little flux or to low temperature. You would not solder anything correctly in that way. 5. Remember about solder surface tension. It will auto align little mistakes(might not work that good with connector because of ground pins). 6. When you are doing things like this don't get too stressed out. You need to be pretty precise and fast, but becasue you didn't practise on anything that calliber before your movements are chaotic and random which probably contributes to your mistakes. 7. Practice on something that is junk anyway before. You should be able to get good results after learning a bit about basic properties of the material that you are working with. 8. Especially being beginner. Not having correct tools for the job will make it nearly impossible to do. Not having heater might not be a problem for someone that was doing a lot of such stuff before. But for you it might be doing tremendous difference. If possible always try to pause what you are doing before getting tool. By not having it from the beginning you will do probably mess and later you would get it anyway. Realizing that you could do better job. Good luck

Some tips: 1: get some kind of magnifying device. 2: Be EXTREMELY careful not to pull of the part until it is free floating, if you pull the PCB will break! 3: Preheating is key, but for connectors like that, you can also heat the board from the other side or use heat just above the melting point. 4: Make sure your hands are stabilized, if you have to hold the part and the weight of your arms you will be damaging stuff. 5: Solder between the pads can be removed with the solder braid 6: Practice on old boards and practice some more! Cheers!

As someone who does small electronic repair for a living, this is the most stressful thing I've seen all week

A few tips from someone that has spent the past few years learning this kind of thing. 1. Get a board holder. This is so important. You had the board at temperatures where the solder was molten whilst dragging it around your mat. You could have moved components on the other side of the board killing everything. 2. You can remove bridges quite easily. Flux it up and run your clean tip over the pins, or use wick. You could have saved that port. 3. Ports with holes in like this, I tend to just heat the board from underneath to prevent the heat melting the port. This port however was quite accessible, I probably wouldn’t even have used hot air to reflow it, I’d remove all the solder from the ground pins, push it though and resolder everything with an iron. This prevents potentially killing the board with excess heat, and prevents going through x5 ports. This is technically a pretty easy repair, once the board was removed it should have taken a couple minutes, so I guess this really does show how important taking baby steps is. I still really advise that people learn to do their own repairs. Probably don’t jump straight to a £3000 camera though haha(well £700 second hand now).

Is it just me, or could 90% of Linus's frustration and problems have been solved by using a handy helper? Could even have applied the hot air gun to the back of the board and avoid burning the HDMI socket (and possibly avoid over heating the whole board by not doing it so many times)

I have never felt a video so much. I always try to repair electronics and it rarely goes well. Especially the ribbon cables!

Honestly while I absolutely support repairing your stuff it is also refreshing of you to show this part of the journey. In too many videos the hard and time consuming parts of these projects are 10 second montages. It doesn’t work like that. Sometimes you will make things worse. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try but always good to keep in mind.

Pro tip on how to solder those connectors, wick up all the existing solder, then solder the two outermost high density pins (not the mounting tabs, DO NOT use hot air to reflow it in place - as you hopefully learned lol). Then use a square shaped soldering iron tip to do the rest of the pins at once, as long as the connector is constantly submersed in flux the flux will mostly prevent solder bridges from forming. Using .015" or .010" solder is a MUST, and preferably 62/36/2 silver bearing solder helps. Finally, solder the two tabs. Preheating and using hot air to place the connector was completely unnecessary and ricked damaging other components on the PCB.

⚠ IMPORTANT TIP - All of this could have been avoided if the following setup had been used: A right-angle cable and... black hot glue. 😜 I kid you not. We use right angle mini-HDMI cables and then use a hot glue gun and build a sort of barrier around the connector. It takes about 15 seconds to glue the cable onto the camera, the black glue is more sticky and flexible than the basic kind but all of that can also be removed easily when needed. Most of the time though, you keep the camera in the rig with the cable attached to it. So the HDMI output is protected at all times when shooting. We don't break those ports anymore. 😎👍

Connectors and hot air do not get along. Hot air is great for removing already-broken connectors, but a pain for installing new ones for all of the reasons Linus illustrated. The only time you want to use hot air for installation is if the component has terminals you can't reach with a soldering iron. Even then, you want to pre-heat the PCB to as close to the solder melt temperature as you can reasonably manage. Radiant (think toaster oven coils under the PCB) or convective (similar to the hot air station, but wide, slow moving and under the board) board heaters are common. If all the terminals are accessible (not sure if Linus' were), the good old soldering iron is the way to go. Bridging contacts is actually okay - add a little flux and clean off the extra solder with solder wick. The same capillary action that makes the wick work will keep solder between the terminal and PCB pad, assuming the terminal is flat against the pad. That means doing your best to clean off the pads before adding flux and placing the component. They can be tinned (solder colored) but should look completely flat. In this case, you don't add any solder or solder paste before placing the component - the flux already in the joint, a pre-heated PCB and the iron heat will let regular old wire-type solder flow into the joint in a heartbeat. Don't try to solder individual pins. Do 3 or 5 (or however many fit under your iron tip, which should be the largest you can physically use for the job BTW - better thermal transfer) terminals at a time, or even get a blob of solder on your iron tip and (gently) drag it down the row of terminals. With a little practice, the blob will heat up the contact and pad, flow some solder into the joint, then separate cleanly (assuming the flux hasn't all boiled off) as the blob moves on. Again, bridged terminals can be de-bridged with wick and still more flux.

This is literally the greatest advert for Sony's Repair Services. I doubt they could've done better themselves.

as someone who has experience micro soldering, this is painfully hilarious.

Micro HDMI is the worst. I recommend getting a camera cage and clamping down an adapter (to actual, real HDMI) that just always lives with and in the camera.

This repair makes me feel better about some of my attempts! Thank you!

Tried to do this with a broken 1dxii... couldn't get it, put it back together wrong, and it shorted something on the board and costed extra to repair

on all the camera rigs I've worked on, there's a micro HDMI to HDMI adapter dongle hotglued into the camera, and the female full size HDMI port is mechanically locked to the camera rig frame to prevent someone unplugging the tally monitor slightly too roughly and writing off the camera body.

Welcome to small-tech repairs Linus, lol 14:15 is typical behavior when working in a shop and under time pressure. Hilarious to watch how quickly he adopted the spirit of a real technician. Great stuff, keep it up. All the best!

A friend of mine many years ago told me that a short extension for HDMI and USB ports will make the port last longer as you will not be applying pressure to the port when connecting and disconnecting it. Most short extensions are 3 ft or less and cost very little compared to the cost of repairing-replacing ports.

Pro-tip: buy a 10cm microhdmi extension cable so you connect and disconnect mostly from the extension, that way you can extend the life of the microhdmi port.

So, to anyone who might want to try something similar, remember: if you're changing a port, hot air is only for removal. To solder the new port on, use the iron and the iron only. Tack the legs in, then solder the pins. Also, if you bridge 2 pins together, just use some flux and touch them with the iron until it's good

I love Brandons reactions as he takes it apart, gasps of terror on his precious camera.

I absolutely loath working on small shit. The frustration shown here is so real, I also understand not wanting to throw shit away.

As a Louis Rossman viewer and someone who has never soldered anything, this video makes you realize how incredible his work is

Honestly found this "experience" highly relatable and I feel a lot better about how stressed I get doing this sort of thing.

Reconnected those ribbons without using tweezers/forceps. Amazing.

this made me feel so much better about learning to do something hard and resiliency, thanks for sharing! great background video while I'm working on stuff

I know it's content that you were after, but I love that it went from $500 to fix in probably a week or two, to $600 + dozens of hours between filming and the actual attempts at repairs, along with weeks of waiting for parts and calibration 🤣

The number of comments I received today about this video.....All I can say is, 12:20 Gone to the 9th dimension. You won't find it.

reparing boards like this is my student job rn and it reminded me of my first days, appreciate showing people out of their comfort zone and also shows how important right to repair is

Yep, I've broken my fair share of ports during repairs. When you get frustrated, you've really got to step back and approach the problem later with a cool head (and a hot board!)

Really should invest in a strain relief clamp for those Sonys-you can leave a micro to full HDMI dongle in there permanently.

Little tip from someone who worked on PCBs for a long time. If you want to use a heat gun and want to minimize the possibility of desoldering or damaging other components you could put Kapton tape around the spot where you are working. 2 or 3 layers if you wanna be really safe. It's really heat resistant and protects the covered areas.

As someone who broke the connector on his drawing tablet i find this whole experience highly relatable, although you were supposed to use heat resistant tape around the area to reduce the chance of damaging the surrounding components, it might still have happened anyways as i can attest...

Kudos to Nick for the attempt of "un~linusing" the camera👍

This is why you leave a short microHDMI to HDMI adapter cable plugged into it permanently. So you don’t destroy the port on the device, you damage the cable and can replace that instead.

Suggestion, connect a micro hdmi extender to the camera so when continuasley unplugging and repliging, strain is put on the extender cable rather than the expensive to repair micro hdmi connector on the camera. When the extension cable fails, replace it with a new one, which is a lot cheaper than a motherboard replacement and will reduce wear on the camera.

Plugging a cable into the connector while trying to place it can help. Gives you decent control compared to the tweezers and helps to act as a heatsink to remove some of that heat building up on the part. I usually do this for XT30/60 plugs that I use in quadcopters as it keeps the pins aligned correctly, and reduce the chances of heat damage.

So essentially, you spent more money by trying to save money by fixing it yourself, and then breaking it and having to pay more money to get it fixed

Massive respect for LTT showing the reality of the build montage. Even more respect for modeling how mature people can deal with incredibly frustrating setbacks and ultimate failure without punching walls. Things don't always go according to plan. What your employees remember is how you dealt with it.

Tip for future repairs, if you want to attach a new connector that doesn't have much heat resistance, you can always use the hot air underneath the board. This allows the solder to melt and give you enough time to place the connector, with little chance of damaging it, provided there is no components on the other side that could be damaged by the heat.

I've been doing this for two decades, and honestly Linus, you are better at this than i expected. Not your first fix, but definitely not what you do for a day job. Good work!

I am a do it yourself guy when something breaks and on my own experience, I always end up breaking up something inside small gadgets such as cameras, phones, computers when trying to fix them. There's always a ribbon cable that breaks, or connector that gets damaged, so I can relate to this video. My advise is, if the broken gadget does not work at all, and the possible fix is inexpensive, go ahead, but learn when to stop before becomes more expensive than buying the item you are trying to fix new.

Pro tip: put a mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter in the port, glue the heck out of it and use the Adapter as a port. Do this before the Mini HDMI port gets weak.

After working a lot of time disassembling things like this, maybe I can throw some tips. (PS: I hate soldering fpc connectors for smart phones screens) 1- Check your mechanical process. You are clearly forcing the port to come out when is not ready. Apply a heck ton of flux, and let the hot air do his magic. The port will come out on his own, it's not necessary to pull it. Also. When soldering the connector back. If you are using solder paste, you first clean the pads, then put the new port over the solder (centered), and then apply hot air. In the case of using soldering wire... You clean the pads, then apply a bit of fresh solder to the pads, then put a heck ton of flux, and finally you put the new port centered to apply air (in this step you can use some tweezers to keep the port from flying away). 2- Check your chemistry. Not every flux is equal and every variation of flux has his use. If you are expending too much time trying to remove the connector, your flux will burn away. Try a flux that can resist a bit more temperature. A good sign of the correct flux is that your connector comes out cleanly and leave behind a little puddle of flux without any marks on the board. Also, even when is not common, if the pcb to repair is old and has a bit of rust (the solder looks a lot dull), you can use an acid flux... just don't forget to clean that after soldering since acid flux tends to corrode small traces with time. 3- Check your cleaning process. This is quite simple... the more clean that's your work surface, the easier that is to work. Put a lot of flux, remove the part, clean the pads, the remove all the residual flux. With a clean surface you can apply fresh flux or even paste. If your surface is clean, the solder will flow on his own. 4- Check your soldering params. Even when the temptation to put your soldering iron to the max or the air gun to over 450C, you first need to know with what kind of material you are working. If you are trying to solder something that has plastic (most fpc and internal board connectors), you need to regulate the temperature in your station. The range depends on every station, but from experience, I can recomend something near to 325c to 350c max for hot air, and 225 max for soldering iron.

When dealing with plastic components, you can set the air temperature to 320C at most. It's good to have bottom hot air preheater to help you heat up the board - that's what you want to heat up, not the component. Also, you should place the component into the solder paste (if that's what you were using) instead of melting it beforehand - the flux in the paste should help against bridging of the pins. BTW, to improve longetivity of the connector, I'd add a short extension cable and a 3D printed holder to keep everything fixed without stress to camera's connector.

Use the iron before the heat gun, you can replace/dope the crappy lead free solder with low melting temp leaded solder. That way when you go in the heat gun you're dealing with lower melting point, the part comes off easier. Flux is still a must.

Should probably include "helping hands" to things that you will need, they really help when soldering stuff

After seeing Linus work on this I was 100% sure the camera's dead! 😂😂

7:09 the moment where he pointed at the wrong port is where everything is going downhill...

I've had so many micro hdmi cables break on me. Always worth trying another cable just in case, which I'm glad you did.

I love how he tried to save 500$ and ended up spending 600$ and lots of his time 😭

Moral of the story: Right to repair is essential but that does not necessarily mean that you can or you should fix your device 😂

By the way there is a way around this … small rig makes a clamp for those cables as well as making an awesome light weight micro to full size adapter that screws right on to the cage. Actually there you only plug in the micro hdmi once and then the little bolted down adapter where the full size hdmi comes out is the thing that you plug in to regularly keeping weight and stress off the small port

Really enjoyed this video. thank you for not being like all of the 5 minute craft videos lol, I hold an aerospace solder/troubleshooting certification and I really enjoyed you showing that it is possible to do these repairs on your own. Right to repair all the way!!! Would love to see you do more types of these videos

"I tried to save money. I failed HARD." Me too, Linus, me too...

As someone who does this kind of stuff daily, this was painful. Still enjoyed watching the struggle though.

Linus says "there's no way around that..." Well actually for our Sony A7R3 used for photography and video content we invested in a smallrig cage for it, which is small enough to fit in the Crane3 gimbal when required, but also gives a firm cage to Velcro strap the hdmi cable in place. The cable we have is a curly chord MicroHDMI with a right angle plug, so it sits flush with the Smallrig cage. This can sit permanently mounted on the camera for various movements of the camera and when needing to plug it into an input, such as our Atomos recorders, or a wireless Hdmi transmitter, they can either go directly in, or using a HDMI extension cable, where it then plugs into the curly cable without touching the hdmi port.

15:06 can't stop rewinding to that insertion. So satisfying.

You don't need 430C, just lower it to like 350C and take it slower. Also, do a circular motion with the gun to make the heat more uniform. Going too fast will usually result in stuff like this where you melt the plastic.

The newest generation of Sony full frame cameras all use full size HDMI now. These cameras are amazingly small for how many components they contain.

I have hand tremors so I use helping hands, swivel arm rest that attach to my desk, and my soldering iron is attached to a flexible microphone holder.

As someone who does electronics work as a hobby, it's dark comedy to watch LTT attempt a repair of this precision with only about half the required tools. The lack of a hot plate is the least of it. A reflow oven is really what they need, but barring that they need some sort of specialty de-soldering alloy like QuikChip, heat resistant ceramic tweezers, and Linus should definitely be wearing at least jewelers' glasses to help him see wtf is going on up close (even better would be to have an industrial inspection microscope that he can just put the board under and look into the whole time). An alligator stand or "helping hands" as they're called would greatly assist in keeping the board in place and not moving around, and it's obvious from the issues they were having with the solder application that they needed a more fine point soldering tip for their iron. They also should have used heat-resistant Kapton tape to cover all the other parts of the board they weren't working on to protect them from the heat gun.

never E V E R apply any amount of force on a component you are desoldering as you may rip a pad. The idea is you melt the solder, not breaking it. It is a bit more difficult when components are also adhered into place or if there are thru-hole mounting tabs, but for most smd components if you feel it doesn't want to come out, then it's probably not reflown correctly yet.

I love how any tech failures at LMG just turns into a video concept that honestly is some of my favorite videos of just Linus digging Into tech you don't normally get to see. Please keep posting videos like these!!

It's funny to see this online considering that this is my current day job, I also see the process being followed was not correct on removing that main board, causing that fpc to tear, but as for the green the board comes empty from sony and needed adjustments to correct itself, normally White balance adjustments fixes the green

i love this, lets have more "Linus fixes(or tries) things"

The 'external screen' is actually a data recorder giving 10bit and higer bit rate over the internal 8bit and compressed video. The answer is to use lighter cables as its only a short run. I found some coiled ones and cable tie them to camera cage.

Why not use a micro hdmi coupler and keep it always connected to the camera ? Then you don’t have to wear out the port

Reminds me of my apprenticeship around 6 month of it I was Fixing DSLR's mostly canon and it was very timeconsuming but I also learned alot. U guys were lucky that nobody accidentally touched the flashlight capacitor we always had to discarge it or be very careful I once forgot it and hand a burn mark on the entry and exit point of the current on my skin.

I know it didn't go as planned, but this is such a real experience for the amateur.

There is nothing more valuable than the chance to learn from other peoples failures. Thank you so much for posting this process with all the bumps and bruises. I love the right to repair movement and will always advocate having a better understanding of your hardware and doing your own maintenance if possible. However I feel to many repair advocates skip over the fact that if you don't know what you're doing or aren't following the directions of someone who does, you can easily double any potential professional service bill or wind up needing to pay for a full replacement. Right to repair wont make everyone a skilled technician, but it will empower people to do the simple repairs that can double the lifespan of everyday items like phones and laptops.

Quick tip: when trying to remove a component try not to lever it off at all, as that rns the ris of ripping up pads. Flood it with flux and wait till the solder is all wet before pulling it off!

To be fair to Linus, the children at the factory have much smaller fingers

ive taken apart a very similar camera and they are a nightmare. I've had issues with accidentally partly breaking a ribbon cable causing intermittent issues. the only way i could think that your hot air/soldering iron would cause more issues is if you accidentally burnt/knocked off other components (potentially on the other side of the board underneath the connector). It's important to use a board holder because its very easy to float components underneath. that being said, next time you should try either reducing airlfow/holding hot air station farther away from the connector or heat from below. if you stick the board partly off the side of the table and either hold it with something heavy on the other end or a board holder, it should be stable and give you enough room to work with. also low melt makes it easier to removing connectors with lead free solder

As someone who had to tear down my A7III to replace the audio jack and in the process ruined my back screen, I feel your pain.

I do this stuff everyday and watching this reminded me of all the stuff I broke. You learn a lot from messing up but it sucks more when it's a customers device :(

Also...it's super refreshing to see the level of frustration I experience anytime I work with small electronics 😅 🖤

You can _fix_ bridged pins fairly easily _with a soldering iron._

The part where Nick takes over is like a tech horror movie.. Anyway, the real lesson is when you are quoted $ X for a job and you find the parts only cost $X/10 realise you are not factoring in your time/stress/high risk of failure and experience (whether formal or not) of the guy/company offering the repair service.

I do SMD repair and watching Linus ripping up that port as he was heating it loose was painful viewing. That's a real easy way to rip off the pads/traces and then you have a whole different repair to endure.

Yep, know that feeling of frustration after trying to fix something like that and things going wrong. Don't have hands steady enough for microsoldering, ribbon cable gets bent the wrong way, bad time.

And this is why the A7IV being plug and play with just USB 3 is so great.

This is one Linus' most relatable videos yet for me. I've had 2 pcbs with broken usbc connectors and ripped pads that I've been trying to repair. I've never been so irritated in my life. Where's Nicolas?

As a preventative measure. On a larger rig you can use a connector saver. This is just a super short extension cable. Only unplug the main cable, always leave the extension on, that way the wear acts on the easily replaceable extension. Of course this isn't perfect but it extends life of the main connector some. I use this concept on high volume tests systems that go through 40k insertions a year.

ah man so much gore in this. like watching the fng build a full loop system and run the pump dry for 19 minutes then wonder why it sounds like a bag of spanners some tips: - heat shield plastics / sensitive ICs - heat shielding is metal plates / thermal pads etc - components can be heated from the reverse side to remove - invest in board holders for small boards like C1390C - positioning and prep are key, secure the board, tools at hand ready - get into a comfortable position to work static for long periods (this is so unbelievably key, heard louis rossman say it in a vid once, such a key piece of info) - as above, position the job don't awkwardly try and work around it - plan what you're doing step by step don't just barge in - be patient when removing components - heat has to saturate the whole area to bring it and the solder up to temp - add flux and leaded solder to alloy lead free solder and bring down the melting temp - when soldering, be still, components could move or detach - leave the job to cool down in room temp, don't move it as you risk warping - less time in with hot air the better, alloying, flux etc all help - don't pull on the component you're removing, it'll move free when the solder is liquid - components ready to be removed will move with zero effort - BE STILL ! - BE PATIENT ! - after removing a component, work fast if wicking as the board holds heat - wicking is a dark art - use a small piece of wick, don't leave it attached to the whole roll, it'll heat sink - when wicking use a wide soldering tip, you're heating more stuff, larger tips convey more energy - small wick can be held with tweezers - when wicking watch the solder go liquid and soak into the wick, if it doesn't maybe you need more flux or heat (or patients) - small pads = fine wick, large pads = thick wick - bad practice wicking = ripped pads - once clean of old solder, tin the pads - tin clean pads with leaded it'll reduce the time you spend heating to install the new component - clean the area, Isopropyl + q-tips / small sponges etc - add a little flux before adding the new component it'll help hold it in place - when heating the new component on, the flux + tinned pads will pull it into place - clean your work after - let it cool fully before touching it again - INSPECT YOUR WORK !!! there's plastics, pins etc make sure they are all ok - soldering like this should be like surgery not like ripping a nail out of a piece of wood - practice on old motherboards, they contain many different components, ICs, caps, smd this, through hole that, perfect practicing tool - this job needed a scope so you can test (push with tweezers) each leg of the port and micro tip solder each one so they're strong as the port has physical forces on it - even a mounted reading magnifier would have made this easier - lastly, flux and fumes a pretty nasty, you got one pair of lungs, extract air accordingly and make sure it doesn't dislodge components that are loose from your work hope that helps someone not butcher their repair

You can get cable clamps that are model specific for cameras that remove the weight of the cable from the port on cameras

This was painful. Tip for soldering pins like that. Clean the pads with the wick and flux. Then clean the area with isopropyl alcohol. Make sure it's all clean. Don't bother with the solder paste. Flux the pads again, load the iron with some solder and load the pads that way. The flux will prevent the solder from bridging if done correctly. Clean the area again with isopropyl alcohol. Use some copper tape, kapton tape, or high temp tape and block the area around the connector. Flux the pads well and lay the connector down on the pads. Take the temp of the heat gun down slightly so it won't kill the plastic of the connector. Also, turn down the fan intensity of it. Try to keep the heat on the pins and pads more than the connector itself. Be patient and keep the heat moving back and forth. It'll take a little bit but you should start seeing the solder melt. Don't get excited and take the heat off yet. Keep moving it around until all the solder is completely molten on pins and the grounds. After that, pull the heat away and let it sit for 5-10 minutes to cool down.

I already thought in the middle of the soldering attempts: "if your goal is to toast the board, you've done well" usually you don't use the heat gun to solder connectors, only the solder iron (if possible)

Just so you know, Sony cameras offer an option to use the USB port as a webcam output! It's limited to 1080p, but that would be a good use for a camera without the hdmi out.

in the army to protect cables and connectors we always use a messenger strap for the most expensive gear

I’ve also worked on a camera recently (sand in the lens assembly unfortunately) and OML is it insanely hard compared to even an iPhone. While stuff isn’t glued down, there are so many more tiny ribbon cables and layers of screws all going around to different places. Could also be the fact that I’m much more used to taking apart smartphones and similar devices but damn does it feel really different.

On removing the old connector you'd want to wait until you can just kind of tap the top of it and it wiggles before you start trying to remove it. I'd also recommend trying to gently tap it to the side when you think it's ready before lifting on it. If you got a pad stuck you're less likely to rip anything with a sheering force then a prying one. As far as the new port goes I'd have used solder paste and hand soldered the through-hole mounting pins to hold it in place before hand. I would have definitely been doing all this under a microscope or at least some sort of magnification to make sure the alignment is right. Other than that, this is just what gaining experience looks like. You took what you knew, tried to apply it, had some setbacks, and now you'll know more for next time.

Fun tip for anyone with a camera that runs with micro HDMI slots, Smallrig make a tiny extension that goes from micro HDMI to full size, and is of course built for mounting to a cage :)

sealed chambor with a gas along with sound and other things to insure the coating inside is still grounding