 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here for today's video. Going to be taking a look at connecting an external monitor to a Canon XA series pro camcorder. So the camcorder I'm going to be connecting with today is going to be the XA 40. This is kind of the bottom range of Canon's XA pro camcorder series. There's also the XA 45, 50 and 55. Now the good news from a monitoring standpoint, if you want to start using an external camera monitor is that they will all drive an external monitor output. So you can use a external monitor to watch what you're doing. And it just makes it a lot easier than trying to look that small LCD screen or using the OLED monitor. And the good thing is also that a lot of external camera monitors come with sun visors. So you can also use it in sunny conditions. The differences between the Canon XA 40, 45, 50 and 55 really boil down to the SDI output for pro broadcasting use as well as timecode. But you can monitor on all of those and they're pretty much the same form factor. So how to do this, you're going to need to connect a HDMI cable to the side jack of your Canon XA pro camcorder. And it's actually on my XA 40, it's mini HDMI that's important to note. It's not a full size HDMI connection. So the cable that I'm using to connect my monitor is mini to regular HDMI and it's this. This is the newer F 100 seven inch camcorder. I picked this guy up on Amazon and it's a 1280 by 800 max resolution monitor. Now that is very important. And when I actually connected this for the first time, I thought it was a dud purchase that it wouldn't work. The reason is the max resolution, you need to configure that as the output resolution on your XA 40. I'm going to go into that in just a moment. So if you're shooting in 4k, let's say the camera, unless you tell it to output to HDMI lower resolution is going to want to output at that resolution. So if you output at a resolution that's greater than what the external monitor can support, in this case, my external monitor is limited to 1280 by 800. Then clearly you're going to have a problem and the monitor will throw up a message like signal, not detected or something like that. So let's go ahead and do that now. So there is a couple of settings here and I'm just going to hold up the camera to my webcam. Pretty basic tech here, but this should show you guys where that is. So you want to jump into the menu and I'm just going to bring this up in a second here and it's over in the fourth screen, which has a kind of screen icon. So it looks like this is going to hold us up like this and you can see the first option there is HDMI max resolution. Now that's the first thing. So I had to change that to 1280 by 800 in order to get this to work. And the second thing that you might want to do is there's a second page to those HDMI settings and that's where you can toggle on and off the on screen display. So you can actually get a pure HDMI output or a clean HDMI output that doesn't doesn't have anything on the screen except for the actual video signal. That's on the second page and there's also a on screen markers option as well. So if you want to get a grid three by three, that will show both on the LCD on the camera as well as the external monitor. And that's that setting is located on the second page of those settings you have there LCD. I put I put on screen displays and I put markers. So I have the on screen displays setting on on screen markers setting off. So that's basically it. So I'm going to just set up the camera for recording. I'm in camera mode. I have a recording here and now we just want to make sure that my HDMI cable is connected to my external monitor. So I'm going to go ahead and do that right now, connecting it into the side panel. So obviously you want to also make sure that you buy a long enough HDMI cable. I'm just going to grab the battery for the monitor here just off the side of my desk. I actually had it charging and now all I need to do. I'm going to hold my camera. Let's see, I'm going to hold it like this way. I'm going to go ahead now and pop the battery into the monitor and we should start working. Battery connected. So it's just going to take a little second here for the monitor to turn itself on and get through the home screen and just give it two more seconds. I should press the on button of course. OK, now the on button has been pressed and you can see those nice sun visors. Neewer is going to come up for a second and there we go. And now we're getting the camera display out through the monitor. Now you can see once you have those on-screen markers turned on, you're getting pretty much everything you would through the LCD on the camera. You're getting the level meters, autofocus indicators, and you can see now as I just kind of move with my other hand the camera by the room, we're getting that as well. So you might find those on-screen markers on the external monitor distracting, useful, but you can toggle them either way. And you've also got of course the battery level indicator, which is helpful. So really everything you can get on the built-in LCD you can get on this external monitor. So that's it guys. If you own the XA40 or another one of the XA Pro series camcorders from Canada, I hope this video has been useful showing you how to get the external monitor running. Just to reiterate again, the one thing you don't want to do is have the HDMI output set to a setting above the maximum resolution of your external monitor. So if your external monitor is less than 1980 by 1080, aka 1080p, or 4K, whatever the case may be, you're going to want to lower that HDMI resolution to the max output monitor. I don't think there's any reason you'd want to go lower than the max because you want to see as a monitor as well as possible. Just one final thing to say as well, because HDMI carries audio, the audio actually comes into the external monitor. So I've got a pair of headphones plugged into the external monitor and that way I can kill two birds with the one stone. I can monitor both the video and the audio as I'm capturing it through the XA40 via HDMI. Hope this video was useful. If you own the XA40, if you'd like to get more videos from me about videography, technology and other subjects, please consider subscribing to this YouTube channel. Thank you for watching.