 Hey guys welcome back to my youtube channel this is Daniel Rosalier and if you've been following the videos on this channel you might be aware that I recently upgraded to a fantastic new camcorder it's the Canon XA40 Pro camcorder this is kind of the bottom of the XA series by Canon or at least the current models you have in that series XA40 which has a 1 over 2.3 CMOS sensor you have the XA45 which is adding SDI to that so if you're doing broadcast work or streaming then you have the 50 with its 1 in sensor and the 55 will add SDI to a 1 in sensor so the 45 and the 55 have SDI and the 40 and 50 you're getting up to that 1 in sensor for your better low light performance there's other there's other cameras in the Canon pro range including the really the XF series like the XF705 and that's pretty much the top of the range so I watched a lot of test reels on test footage and video was about this guy before ordering it I kind of went a bit obsessive on the research but what I didn't see and that's why I'm putting this up on youtube is a kind of test reel with the camera performance shown in different kind of shooting conditions so in daytime somewhere between daytime and night time like dusk and then night time so I put together a reel because I've uploaded about 10 different clips shot with the XA40 since starting this youtube channel so what I'm going to do now I'm going to show the reel I'm going to put it up on my screen here in front of me I'm going to offer commentary on it I'll boost up the audio and boost down my commentary where relevant because some of the comments are about microphone selection I'm just rendering my test reel as we speak so just give me a second for this to do this is on the fly production here and now I'm going to offer some thoughts about it now definitely that's just finished rendering the performance is a lot better than the Vixia HF4800 which is what I upgraded to this from this is a kind of very consumer camcorder so let us give this a shot and see how this all looks so just give me one moment okay so firstly this is a Damascus gauge we're going to be kind of varied subject matter on this video Damascus gate in Jerusalem and this is what it's included to show you guys what vlogging looks like I was basically just holding this pretty much like this and shooting myself I don't think it's the worst this is an example of what b-roll looks like with this with this camcorder again some b-roll shots of I was talking about the broadcast media presence is at this particular media event here is some more b-roll shot in daytime bright conditions and I was using now this bit's interesting watch what happens here there was an altercation the border police saw something and they moved in and I zoomed in pretty quickly now this is actually shot from a rail at the top of Damascus gate I was holding the camcorder like this not even on a tripod or a monopod and something canon talk about in this camcorder is that the shooting quality I shoot in 1080p even if you're just shooting in 1080 and not 4k you're going to get much better performance at the telephoto ends of that lens and I think you can really see that here this is pretty much at the full zoom and you can see the footage shot is pretty clear I think all right for people interested in using this for ENG type stuff here's interview I shot with a Palestinian guy and this is actually shot with an XLR microphone now we're getting more towards dusk this as this event continued this is the Jewish side they were segregated off by police and you can see the low light performance isn't as good as when it was bright but it's still holding up fairly well as you can see I wasn't using any external lighting on the subject here now this is actually shot with just the shotgun microphone so definitely worked out the sound is decent not quite as good as the dynamic microphone XLR so I just had it on my shoulder like this and I was shooting this guy because I didn't have time to get a microphone over to him and again we're looking at footage shot around dusk approximately so that's that so the same thing here we're getting more towards night you can see the buildings are lit up you have the Israeli flag here so this is a kind of color performance you can see worth pointing out I didn't do any color correction this is me again doing sort of ENG style stuff look at the bokeh here look at the background versus me and in some of the clips I've shot I've been quite impressed by it personally definitely a lot better than the kind of that effect I was getting on the Vixia so you can see the the distinction between my face and focus and the people in the background again same sort of situation here so I think this is very classic ENG type footage like if you're doing reporting for a local TV station this is probably very like what you'd be doing right more up close b-roll taken again from sort of a very you know political scene here and that is more of me okay we're getting to the next one right so here's what using it looks like for vlogging so I shot this at the desk I'm recording this on and the camera is just basically here I've got a little lav mic coming out of the XLR outputs here and just to show you you know most people probably use a webcam like this like what I'm using now in fact because the lens is not really intended for this kind of close angle work or vlogging I do definitely look a bit like too big I'm actually at the same distance from the webcam as it was when I had the camcorder up so something to bear in mind doesn't mean it can't be done it just means you're going to have to position the XA40 a little bit probably further back than where you are if you're intending using it for this purpose I haven't yet got around to running it through a HDMI converter and trying to use it as a webcam but I believe that it can be done with the right converter and of course if you're buying the 45 or the 55 and you have that SDI I put you'd be looking for probably an SDI to HDMI converter I don't know if there are SDI to USB converters for computers I imagine there are but anyway so this by the way comparing vlogging I did with my Vixia with my XA40 I noticed night and day difference I was shooting this in quite low lighting in my office even though I do have a light on me now as you might be able to see but it was definitely quite a lot better with the XA40 we're getting slightly bokeh effect with the background there so sorry this is kind of dragging on a little bit long I'm showing you the same thing but yeah all right totally random footage a cockroach yes a cockroach what I did here I was eating and I saw a cockroach in the ground and I was like let's see how the zoom performance is on the XA40 so look at the detail here I thought this was pretty incredible I mean I'm totally disgusted by cockroaches personally but equally you know you can really see like look you can see the like individual little um joliet things on the cockroaches leg I clearly don't know the actual terminology you can even see the tiny piece of food the dude's eating oh this is so disgusting but um I was quite impressed by the footage and bear in mind also this is shot at night time so we're kind of seeing a combo of full telephoto zoom and we're also seeing um we're also seeing uh full again no macro lens or whatever on the camera this is just coming off I wish I edited this uh real a little bit tighter because I'm kind of uh getting a bit grossed out watching this cockroach um zoom performance by the way you can zoom in on the top handle you can zoom in on the rocker um and you can zoom in on the ring so you've got actually three different ways of controlling zoom all right here's me during the festival of Pesach after a little bit of wine here I decided you know what let's try more experimentary footage so that's vlogging again I don't think it's the worst maybe not the best but you know you can definitely do it it's not that's the benefit of a compact pro camcorder it's not so heavy that you can't hold it up um I decided to film a cat uh because I was like well this will be an interesting subject um again low light conditions so just kind of watch for the detail here as I track this cat again I'm trying here to zoom in really um on the cat's face and look at the detail in its fur um again I think this is pretty pretty decent personally maybe I'm over estimating my uh my my videography skills presumably also I'm going to get a lot better as I get more used to this camera and eventually I'll start shooting in manual mode this is tracking the cat and I'm using automatic white balance uh it does look a bit kind of neonny I think uh it could have been probably better if I did this manually but um so this is again if you're shooting it probably doesn't get much darker than this uh in an urban environment okay here's footage shot again during again excuse all the kind of very random themes here but this is a thing that uh Jewish people do before Passover uh kosher dishes so again here's more totally handheld vlogging compared to the tripod vlogging I did earlier and I really like the shot of steam coming off and again I'm just kind of zooming in um so to be honest I mean depends really I guess what your expectations are and what you've been using previously I firstly love the ergonomics of this camcorder it's a joy to carry this thing by the top handle it's light enough I can lift it up and get over somebody's head and um you know I'm not a cinematic footage kind of guy I'm very happy that there is some bokeh available and I've been really happy with everything I've shot with this camcorder and I've just done 1080p so far I think I've only shot one clip in 4k this is all 1080p what you're watching here on this test reel um two more minutes to go stay stay with me guys because if you're thinking about investing 2000 bucks in a camcorder by all means what I think you should watch my test reel and other people's test reels because you'll get a good feel for what kind of performance you can expect we're seeing again more kosher uh koshering of vessels so a mixture of uh tight angles and wider framing angles being used here and you can see with good clarity the steam coming off this boiling pot of water there in the background um and the immersion in the cold pool of water yeah you guys are really getting all the detail here here's some flames uh this guy was using kind of a flamethrower and I was probably one meter away from him um and this is sound capture in all these clips I'm just going to lower the level a bit okay this one is finally a nice shot so this is shot outside Damascus gate again but shot during night time as you can see and now I would say is the point where we're really starting to see the low light performance suffer uh this is vlogging at night time me standing in front of Damascus gates I'm a little bit of bokeh visible here um but I would say that that opening framing shot where I had the lights I think the low light performance you can see it starting to get really noisy there um so it can it can keep up to a point and then there's kind of a point this is just my observation where you know it suddenly starts degrading rapidly um and I think that point was uh was reached here so uh we're almost done we're almost done we're almost done me in front of Damascus gate doing again what I call a voice to camera or vlogging work this isn't shot on a tripod or monopod I'm just holding my arms by the way at this place all these news guys kept coming over to help me because they were like why are you vlogging with a pro camcorder so that was really nice of them um this is kind of bright there's a lot of led lights going on here so maybe this exaggerates the type of performance you can expect I've seen people saying they had to overlight their subjects with the xa40 and not on the xa50 so I've seen a lot of people saying you know if you have that extra 700 bucks to spend go for the xa50 all right guys we've made it through the whole test footage real I hope that was informative to someone thinking about buying this camcorder give you an idea for what kind of performance you can expect all that test footage aside I personally have been immensely immensely happy with this and as I say I'm doing video for a hobby so uh I have to sort of um invest a little bit conservatively in all this gear my only regret is if I had an extra whatever it was I would have got the xa50 and if I'd done extra more money I probably would have gone for the xo705 because I'm really invested in the in the camcorder market and I've been really happy with Canon so far so yeah hope that video was useful and if you want to see what more videos shot with the xa40 look like keep following this youtube channel because I'm going to be keep uploading more videos shot with it thanks you for thank you for watching and if you want to get more 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