 Hey guys welcome back to my YouTube channel, this is Daniel Rosal here. Another video about the Canon XA40 professional camcorder, an absolute beast of a device from Canon. The bottom really of their 4k capable professional camcorder range beautiful product. Absolutely loving every single day shooting with this guy. And as I'm learning about the camcorder through daily use and you know thinking of things too that might be of interest to other users I'm just throwing up these videos. So one of the points I realized using this is there's actually three different ways to control zoom which if you're coming from a DSLR mirrorless might seem a little bit ridiculous but that's kind of the beauty of the camcorder form factor and that's why these half historically remained the normative or really popular choices amongst people working in ENG electronic news gathering broadcasting documentary work because where DSLR mirrorless pack a lot of stuff into the menus the beauty of camcorders is that you've got a ton and ton of switches it sometimes looks it reminds me a little bit like the you know flight control panel on a Boeing 747 you've got knobs and dials and buttons everywhere but that's actually a real advantage when you're out training get stuff done quickly just want to you don't be reaching into menus you want to just be eventually it kind of becomes a muscle memory that's the idea behind this so the three ways to control zoom on this camcorder so firstly you have at the front of the camcorder you have a ring there's a single ring here and this is an interchangeable ring that can be used to either control the focus or the zoom now the way that that is controlled is in itself a switch I'll just lift up the camcorder here and I hope you can make that out just to the just to the left of the viewfinder there is a knob that toggles this between focus and zoom so I currently have it set to zoom and if I flip that up to focus this ring is now controlling focus so that's if you like the manual feel of actually moving a ring as you adjust your zoom you'll really like this it just feels so so good now one one other good point I'm just going to clear off my desk a little bit to try whoops one other point about this worth mentioning is that you can control the zoom speed for all these three things differently so that might be really useful if you want to say well I want the zoom speed on the ring to be fast and on the rocker which is going to be the second thing I want to show you guys rocker is right here and the rocker is slow or at the top handle is slower so you can actually have different zoom speeds for each of the three ways so that's number one is you're going to show you the menu options for adjusting those speeds momentarily it's a little bit off-balance because of the weight of the shock and microphone here so number one is using the zoom ring number two is using the zoom rocker and this is probably the way that a lot of people will be most familiar with it's their labels w and t which stands for wide and tight so this is tight and this is going wide this for reference is the battery and the viewfinder so as I'm pushing down I'm going wide and as I'm pushing in I'm going tight and as the optical zoom is in transition you'll get on the menu a little sort of it's like an arrow and it shows you as you're moving from from wide to tight and finally I know I'm using this guy always with the top handle connected because I bought this camcorder specifically to have accessorization and to get the procamcorder look so I leave it like this and on the top handle you have here you can see I've got a light in the cold tube but just before the light I have a start stop button for record and just to the left of that there is our third zoom tight and wide again and this one is a smaller one so these can all be controlled as I mentioned using the menu so I'm just going to show you guys how that process works interestingly you can actually disable so I actually was finding when I first started using this this a little bit annoying because I kind of accidentally zoom when I didn't want to but that's up to you so go into the menu and you have soft zoom control is off so if you actually want a fourth way of controlling zoom you can do that in other words soft meaning it's going to be on the menu you can actually enable digital zoom as well you've got your 400 times or digital tele converter I haven't used digital zoom because to be honest the 20 times optical zoom just gets me so far I've never needed I never even I rarely even needed the full telephoto length of it zoom speed level right so this is your normal fast and slow grip zoom operation enabled grip zoom speed now you have to look at the manual to know which one of these are but this is important handled zoom operation so this refers to the zoom rocker here and this is where you can enable or disable that so again if you're using the camcorder a lot like this and this is how I use it frequently you might find that you're you know your kind of knuckle is rocking up against that zoom handle and causing you to zoom unintentionally or the record button that's why I imagine the record button actually has a locker you can lock off the record button so the zoom rocker on the top handle doesn't have one but what you can do instead is if you want to you can disable it using the menu here let's just see what else there is handle zoom speed okay so here's the one I was looking for so I'll end up with this on page four of the camera menu you have a focus zoom ring operation so remember that this little ring towards the front can be either focus or zoom you can actually disable it so if I disable it now it's going to do nothing enable it is good and the zoom ring direction and zoom ring sorry zoom ring direction ah zoom ring direction if I too much coffee as usual before shooting a video can be normal or reverse so that's something to bear in mind as well there so there's no way to soft change that so you just have to go in there and toggle between zoom and focus so that's it those are the three ways you can control zoom on your Canon XA40 and I believe the 50 and the 55 and the 45 all have the same functionalities just to summarize quickly you've got a you've got a ring that a physically operated ring at the front of the camcorder and that can be interchanged between zoom and focus by that little knob just to the left of the OLED viewfinder secondly you have your classic zoom rocker located just to the right of the of the OLED and that's the one I probably use most on a day-to-day basis and finally on the top handle you have an additional record button and you have an additional zoom rocker there that you can use and that should give you plenty of options and you can adjust the zoom speed in the menu and you can also if you want finally just to give yourself all the possible options you can enable soft zoom control that can be controlled with the touchscreen LCD hope that video is useful if you own the XA40 or XA series of Canon pro camcorders and if you want to get more videos from me about a whole miscellany of topics please feel free to subscribe to this youtube channel