 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel, this is Daniel Rossell here on to record today another video about the Canon XA40 Professional Camcorder, this fantastic piece of gear that I upgraded to recently from the Vixia HF-R800 which is what I'm using to record this video on and what I want to cover today is to address a comment I got on that video from someone who watched it. The comment is, is it possible to connect one 3.5mm microphone and one XLR microphone together at the same time to the camcorder, the camcorder being the XA40 and I was actually wondering pretty much the same thing recently so I figured this would be a good launching pad to go and try out so let's just go ahead and see if that can be done. Okay so here's kind of how I'm going to set up this test, this is my Canon XA40. For the XLR microphone I'm going to use this lav mic from Comica, it's the Comica CVM V020 and as you can see it's an XLR connection lav mic and this guy actually requires phantom power to operate. For the 3.5mm ironically this bigger microphone from Saramonic, the foam is a bit loose, this is the Saramonic Cam mic plus, it's actually a battery powered mic that served me really well on the Vixia and as you can see I have this microphone running down the other side into the 3.5mm Mojak intake and this is a battery operated microphone so I'm just going to go ahead firstly and turn it on so now that my microphones are ready to go I'm going to test these and what I'm going to do is because this is a lav mic it's always really easy to test if this is a source by tapping on it, tapping on the foam should be pretty inaudible for the shock and microphone but it should show up very audibly and very clearly in waveforms when looking in the editor and hopefully we will also be able to hear the difference. Likewise I'm going to reach over to the camera, this microphone is on point and do the same, do the tap test on the foam of this one and we should be able to tell if we can capture from both and if we can use both microphones in post production. So I've gone ahead now and connected both microphones to the camera and let's take a look at what changes we want to make to settings. So I'm going to use the hard button just so it's not super distracting firstly go into the settings menu then you want to go across into the first one here which is the video settings and you want to go down there to audio format now by default this guy is going to be set at two channel audio and I'm just going to go ahead and push that over to four channel audio recording LPCM 16 bit four channels now so the codex different but you're also getting four channels so four channels will give you two stereo channels to work with now I'm going to go back here for a second and the next thing you're going to see is if I jump over to the audio menu here we now have a whole bunch of options because it's recognized the two microphone is recognized firstly there is an XLR microphone attached here thus I can affect I can change pretty much everything related to it one other thing you might want to do in a situation like this is jump down here to monitor channels okay and here you're going to get a bunch of interest and permutations using the different audio channels available so I come on there for instance channel one and channel two so that's going to be stereo channel one and two I can just do channel two just do channel one and then I can do these interesting combinations if I go down further channel one and two over channel one and two channel three and channel four but then look at these ones they can do channel one and three over channel two and four and there is also their channel three and four over channel three and four so I can actually monitor these up to these two different microphones at the same time in my display so I'm actually going to go for let's see channel one and three over channel two and four I'm just going to jump out of this menu now and now I'm going to go ahead and do the actual testing now if I click again here into function and I go over to microphone now we can actually see what we're listening to so we have input one input two and left and right so I'm going to do the tap test here I'm going to tap firstly on the shotgun okay and now I'm going to go ahead and tap on the lavalier microphone and you can see you can identify that that channel one is jumping up there so this is just one way to identify the channels that you're recording onto both mostly because I'm being lazy today instead of getting this guy rigged up so what I have now is I'm recording two microphones simultaneously one of those is an XLR mic and one of those is a 3.5mm microphone and I can see both levels on the screen here I'm going to jump to a clip of that so you can see what I'm looking at here and I've just adjusted the manual level on the shotgun microphone to somewhere that it's not peeking like crazy now here's the thing firstly I'm bringing the XLR lav microphone up to my mouth here and I can see the levels are going higher so this audio I'm going to start I'm going to do my tap tap tap test now and this audio should only be really microphone now if I do the same thing again I'm going to be getting hopefully now pretty decent audio on both microphones capturing from both shotgun 3.5mm and XLR microphone and now I'm going to do the inverse test I'm going to just give the okay here's where stuff is going to get interesting so I've gone ahead and taken that recording on the XA40 off the camera I put on my local machine now I edit in sorry in Kaden live on Ubuntu therefore this editing tool might look a bit unfamiliar to you what I'm going to do now is just drag this clip over into my project bin now if you excuse the somewhat unflattering uh photo me here the first thing you'll see and if you edit in Kaden live you might not have seen this before it says four audio streams now by default I typically edit using two audio streams and two video streams so I'm actually going to need to if I just try to drag this into my timeline it's going to stubbornly refuse to go anywhere until I um put enough audio tracks there for this guy to record into so now I have my four audio streams sorry four audio layers and two video layers and now the magic can occur if I drag and drop onto the timeline now what is going on here let's try to make sense of it all I'm actually going to just do this visually by scrubbing through the video now at some point in this test recording I said I'm going to go ahead and bring the lavalier microphone up to my mouth and so that you can see that it's coming from there so look at the video and this is a point where I bring the lab mic up to uh I hold it manually right in front of me and you can see this is where the levels get a lot louder in that microphone so we can see with pretty much certainty uh that this track a one and it's actually only recorded to mono but that's going to be my XLR going to just name it here requires a few clicks sometimes XLR lab mic okay this is then the internal audio microphone if I'm not mistaken uh so we're getting a lot of uh different things going on now you can see there is another interesting peak and that's going to help to identify the other microphone at some point again in the video I say let me do the test tap test on the shotgun microphone and I just tapped on the microphone itself and that's going to naturally create spikes and we can see that there are spikes in three channels now what this is is I'm pretty sure that we're looking at internal microphone uh here on a um I'm going to just go ahead and ungroup these guys to make it easier to see this is the internal microphone is kind of lower and this is a stereo this stare these two audio channels channels three and four so I'm going to group them because it's the same microphone and that is the shotgun microphone and you can see in the video there we go just as they reach up to touch on the shotgun we're getting those peak waveforms in those two microphones I'm actually going to go ahead and delete this channel I'm going to move these guys up here and I'm going to name this shotgun again I need to do two clicks 3.5 millimeter shotgun and they're grouped and this is grouped so this is really really super cool because what it means is that you can record with two microphones so let's say you wanted to use a wireless lab mic 3.5 mils and then you also want to use a shotgun or you want to use two XLR microphones whatever the point is that you can record two microphones simultaneously and I'm pretty sure you can also record internal on top of that so what I can do here is chop this up so let's say for this portion of the interview of me of my video blog I wanted to get audio from the shotgun so I can just clip into it and delete this part of the lab mic audio and now you're going to hear the difference and you can hear the microphone switching over there from one source to the other source and likewise if I play here whatever is on top so I can actually get rid of the of this now watch what's going to happen if I just get rid of the tapping I'm going to cut out the taps here now you can kind of you know you can't really even hear them but there's still audio there and that's coming from the lavalier microphone and then we're going to go back to it there so that's um that's how you can do it so the answer to that question is that yes you can record both XLR and 3.5 mils microphones simultaneously and it does work well and I imagine this is also going to be super useful as I do more advanced things with this particular camcorder hope the video is useful if you did find it helpful and you want to get more videos from me please feel free to subscribe to this youtube channel thank you guys as always for watching