 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosil. Yesterday I recorded a video unboxing my new camcorder and it is the Canon X840 It's the beginning of Canon's professional camcorder range that also includes the X840, X845, X850 and X855 and I spent a good deal of yesterday after unboxing it, which I recorded. I upgraded to this from the Vixia HF-R800 which is actually what I'm shooting this video on. I spent a bit of time unboxing, reading the instruction manual, recording some test footage in low-light conditions and in outdoor conditions and absolutely incredible camcorder. Now the only thing that took me a little bit of time to figure out and that's why I'm making a video because I don't see anyone else who's covered this subject so far on YouTube is setting levels for a 3.5mm mic. So the first thing to say about audio on this guy is I haven't configured here with the professional top-on and I intend leaving it like that because I'm always going to want to potentially use XLR or audio as I upgrade my microphones and on this side of the panel you do have your channel 1 and channel 2 gain trims and you have switch switches there as you can see to turn on 48-volt phantom power on either channel or just leave them as regular mics so you can just toggle these switches like so or put them line 1 line 2 and you have channel 1 channel 2 you have your on-off switch and targeting between manual and auto for the gain controls if I go this way either already on manual and then I can just gain the things as far as I know this control panel is only for your two XLR inputs which are on the other side of the hood the 3.5mm can then have decided to put it in the actual main body itself and just on just as on the Vixia Which is as I say is what I upgraded to you have mic This is mic on the right. Yeah, this is a mic on the right And this is 3.5 out for monitoring on the left so they're side-by-side Just as they are on the consumer camcorder and they've got little dust cover So you need to open up that dust cover and the dust cover in case you're ever confused or you can't exactly make out the ports Everything's labeled. So as you can see there's a headphone setting for the port on the left 3.5 or 8th on the left and there's a microphone Mic written there so that you know that the 3.5mm on the right is where you can actually 3.5 milliliter microphone millimeter microphone or milliliter so That's all well and good. So let me just take out a 3.5 Microphone to connect to this camcorder. I've purposely chosen a super basic but compact cam microphone for this video It's battery powered now something about the This camera is that you do have the ability to it does have it can give 2.4 volts of DC power Therefore it doesn't have the limitation on my previous camcorder the Vixia Which didn't give any and therefore you needed to attach cell powered microphones And if you are using cell powered microphones, you probably want to turn off that power I'm going to show you how to do that Momentarily so just remind myself right is microphone. So getting it connected is pretty easy. Just obviously need to plop your Put your connector into the connection and just for the sake of convenience. I'm going to mount this a Little shotgun microphone here up on the mount At the top of the top handle Actually, that's the only coach accessory shoe available because This one gets used up by the actual top handle itself So now I've got my battery powered microphone powered on it's connected So let me show you now what you can do in terms of levels. I'm going to turn on the camera. I Have the shutter closed, so there's really nothing that you're going to be able to see But hopefully you can see the settings on this screen So you can see on the bottom right corner I'm getting levels and it's saying channel one or channel two So there's a few things that you need to cycle through In order in order to get to this now. I'm going to press the menu button, which is located I've actually configured a shortcut key on the LCD display for menu But the typical way to do that is just by pressing menu On the bottom right, so I'm using the LCD and I'm just going to use the joystick so that I can film while I go so you want to get into your Audio settings, okay Now I'm an audio then you want to come down a level and you can see you've got one two and three now one and two As far as I know are your XLR input so as I have nothing connected to either XLR There's nothing showing but if I go on to channel three, aha, we're getting something so the first setting says Mike ALC link and I have it set to link now if I go up there Your options are going to be linked or separated now what separated does is you're probably going to want to use linked Separated is going to put the 3.5mm microphone on its own channel and the microphone's internal Microphone on its own channel, so you're going to get two channels So you want to actually if you're intending to use this as your microphone. I Would keep this on linked and I'm just going to go back there now Mike power This is where you can adjust the power So if you have a microphone that again if it needs power by turning it on you're going to give it I think it's 2.4 volts of DC power But as I said you don't want to put power into a microphone. That's not intended To get any power whatsoever from whatever it's plugged into therefore I have turned it off just to be safe because I'm in the process of really upgrading all my mics to XLR Headphone volume is there and monitoring channels Is where you can change the monitoring channels that this guy's going to be recording on to? So what I'm going to do here, and that's basically it So just to confirm the most important thing we did there just to go back rather Was to go to channel 3 which is going to be our 3.5 mil input and in the top setting Mike ALC link you want to have that guy set to link and Mike power is important as well depending on whether you're using a 3.5mm microphone that You know needs power or it's all powered like my one my one as you can see it's got a little battery in it Therefore, I'm keeping mine too off So that's the first half of what I wanted to show in this video the second half So now we can see we're picking up levels and those levels channel one and two are together Watch what happens when I turn this guy to off my levels have completely dropped to zero So basically once you connect a microphone into the 3.5 mil jack It's automatically I'm going to turn it back on Little difficult holding the camera now I've turned it on and now hey presto we're getting levels again So basically as soon as you connect a 3.5 mil microphone It's going to automatically jump over to that from the built-in microphone Now the final thing I wanted to show in this short video Well short ish video was how you to set levels and this is where he's getting stuck I was like well for XLR microphones. You've got your little trims up here and you can toggle on phantom power and You put them in here. What about 3.5 mil? Where does that go down? So the the answer is now I have one criticism or one unfortunate thing is that you don't seem to be able to configure The menu level setting is a custom key Which is what I have on the Vixia. So that's actually kind of annoying. So basically if you're using 3.5 mil Microbar sorry exit our microphones It's easier to work with this camcorder because then you can just use The settings here and not have to go into the menu at all But if you do have 3.5 mil microphones like me most of my mics are currently 3.5 You're gonna have to do a little bit of spend a bit of time here So after pressing on function you want to click on that icon below zoom It says it's got a little kind of musical note symbol there And now you can see channel 1 and 2 are Linked together. That's because we've gone for the linked setting now If I didn't go for that setting one of those channels would be from 3.5 and the other channel would be from internal and Hey presto, we've got our level is currently set to 31 and we can see where everything is peaking and just as on the consumer Cancorders this is in my opinion for audio because audio so important video Potentially one of the most important features in the camcorder is the ability to automatically change the gain So you can see I've reduced it to 17 and now we're getting peaks at somewhere like 10 My test is always to stop speaking for a couple of seconds And if I'm in a quiet environment like this my home office I don't want to be seeing a signed recording because if I crank this guy up to Let's say and this I think it's a zero to 100 scale. Let's go all the way to 40 now We can see we're going way way Clipping into zero was everything and if I don't speak We're getting levels and if I were to monitor that audio that would be hissing. So I actually find with the cannon You firstly if you're using external mic you have to go for Manual level and you can go for manual but as you can see the levels are disastrous So something I picked up from the cannon forums is that if you're using external mics? 3.5 more mics with cannon you need to do manual level setting and I have found that typically that's a little bit low 18 18 testing one two three 18 looks a bit right and it's always easier in post production To kind of touch up the game a little bit than it is to work with audio that's clipping So I'm gonna leave if I were using this camcorder now. I'd use it I'd set it to level 18 and once you're there again, unfortunately I don't know of any way to configure this very important page as a shortcut key But it's not so hard to get there. You just need to tap on function on the LCD display And if you're not already there you can actually use yep, you can use the Joystick just to toggle one down and then you've got your channels and you can edit the if I can yeah I can actually use the joystick to I'm using the joystick now as you can see because I'm not touching the screen To just change those manual settings. So that's how you set your levels manually for a 3.5 millimeter microphone on the Canon XA40 professional or a prosumer camcorder. Hope this video is useful And feel free to subscribe if you'd like to get more videos from me on this YouTube channel