 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosel here. I want to talk through a few really important settings on the Canon Vixia HF-R800 via the audio capture and via the monitoring. Now monitoring if you're not aware is when you're listening to your audio as you capture it. And it makes such a difference that if you're using any external microphone, which is really recommended to do so, with this camcorder you'll get a lot better audio. You want to be listening to make sure the levels are correct. You're not getting anything like hissing. So there's a few things I'm going to run through them in turn. Number one, and this took me a while to figure out, whenever you're using an external microphone you pretty much have to be in manual mic levels. Okay, that's really vital. So when you get to that main menu screen there's a setting here for mic level and by default it's going to say A. A stands for auto and M stands for manual. Now what you have here and the bottom left is a level meter and it's moving up and down as I narrate this video here. And basically you have then these two arrows and you have a number, right? Mind set to 18. This is essential. Basically every microphone in my experience requires a different audio level. The way I figured out to use this, I don't know if this is necessarily the correct way or the only correct way. You want to firstly plug in your external mic and then you want to just speak or have your sound going on and see what those levels are looking like. You don't want them too low. You don't want them too high. You don't want them clipping and the level meter will give you those peaks. You can see there's like these flap bars that are coming as the main bar moves and you want to see them. I'm talking really lightly now. We're getting into yellow territory. So you don't want to have it set too high. Another thing you want to do is stop speaking, ideally not have sound and you don't want to be seeing levels registering. If you're not speaking and you're seeing the level meter moving then you've got a problem and it's probably going to come across as artifacts or hisses in the video. So that's kind of the first thing you want to do is set this. Now monitoring audio is really great because there's nothing worse than shooting a whole scene with a microphone. Then you take out your SD card and you realize the microphone was set poorly and the audio is terrible. That's really really frustrating when that happens. So monitoring is a great way around that and it's a pity not to monitor given the fact that the Vixia HF-R800 both has a mic input. It's got two 3.5 mils. One of them, the one on the left is for the microphone input. The one on the right is for the output from monitoring. So given that it exists it's a real pity not to use it now. Just in that regard there's a couple of things to know. So firstly you want to get to your mic settings by clicking on home then go into other settings. Okay now this is like the big the big bold menu on the Vixia. Now the one I want to draw attention to is, and I'm just going to go through it here, I think it's on the final screen. Yes it is. Okay on the final screen the one with the cog wheel that stands for settings you have a really important screen there that says a setting here that says AV slash headphones. Okay and then you've got one for volume and both of these are really important. AV slash headphones if you click into it you're going to have a choice between headphones and AV. If that is configured to AV and I believe it is by default you're not going to be able to monitor the audio with headphones. Now what I monitor audio with are basically these. I'm going to just drag this guy up a second here. These are I always get it wrong audio technica studio headphones and these things are absolutely incredible. So that's kind of the ideal thing you want to be monitoring with. So you want to change this to headphones and then all you need to do to monitor your audio capture is plug in firstly your microphone excuse me as I reach across my desk and then you want to plug in your monitoring headphones into the monitoring thing. Now the other thing to say here the other setting is the volume setting. Now the volume setting goes between goes up to 15 and I find it helpful at about 13 you can play around with that but that's going to basically be how loud it's going to go through your headphones. There is one disadvantage of AV versus headphones and that's as follows. If you're playing back your clips and I think I've just emptied my SD card no I still got one. So now watch what happens I'm in headphones mode watch what happens when I try to play back this clip it does have sound there's no sound. So AV is referring to the monitor so this is something that I don't like about the Vixia or that I wish this feature was a bit it was a little bit different. Once you've gone into headphone mode now if I plug in headphones I will be able to hear this but by default whoops by default when it's gone into AV in order to get that to play through. So watch what I do again now I'm going to go from AV headphones now I'm going to change it to AV now I'm going to go out of this now I'm going to play the clip again. Okay so now as you can hear my commentary is playing through the little speaker on the Vixia itself so that's really important to know that if you're going into so because I rarely play back my clips on the device itself this isn't so annoying but it's a little bit annoying it's sometimes in the field you do you do want to monitor through headphones and you also would like but you'd like to play them back through the actual speaker to like you know have someone listen to them so unfortunately it's like kind of one or the other unless you want to change the setting every single time which is a bit inconvenient. I hope this is useful those are kind of this these are kind of the key features as I see them for setting microphone levels and monitoring audio in the Canon Vixia HF-R800 camcorder