 Hi guys welcome back to my YouTube channel this is Daniel Rosal here I want to talk today about the various external microphone options you can use if you own the Canon Vixia HFR-800 crime coordinator there have been some topics that some videos on YouTube before about what type of microphone you can use but I've amassed quite a collection which I've just bundled right here into a bag so I can just kind of show somebody who's looking at buying an external microphone I'm not going to recommend any of these microphones as in I don't feel strongly about any of them that they're terrific but just to show that there is actually kind of quite a diversity of microphones you can use first thing to say is I'm currently using a wireless lavalier system it's the lapel mic is up here running down into a transmitter and then the receiver is running into the Vixia's at 3.5 mil so that is a you know UHF system operating over I believe it's called 2.4G there are tons and tons of these on the market so again that's why I'm not recommending specific products I'm just talking about the different types of microphone that you can use and you can tell me what the sound quality is like I think it's fairly okay I think it's probably quite a bit better than the internal microphone and best of all it gives me the freedom to move back and forward without losing audio quality because it's a wireless system now if you don't want to go for wireless then I'm going to give you a few options here so the key thing to know about when we're talking about the Vixia HF-R800 it does have a eighth input for 3.5 millimeter microphone 3.5 mil is an eighth of an inch so it's also called an eighth and it also has a 3.5 mil output which means that you can monitor the audio in real time now something really really important two things that are really important to know about using external mics with the Vixia first thing is that you want to go and change the the levels to manual now by default the camera is going to be using automatic levels and within the menu if you click on the home icon scroll down to M you want to click there and then go into manual now what I found is that each microphone each external microphone kind of requires it's slightly different gain setting and that's why monitoring becomes super useful because if you turn up the gain too high you're going to get an audible hit on your external microphone now it's a real pity to find that out in post-production when you offload your SD card into a video editor so really the easiest thing to do is buy yourself something like these things a pair of studio headphones and plug that into the eighth output and then you'll be able to listen before you actually start recording to see that your levels are accurate second thing that's really helpful is to have the level meter turned on I'm looking at the level meter because the LCD is facing me and then you can see again that the levels are good so that's kind of how you do it and then I literally just kind of take notes for each microphone I know that my Canon track shot sounds best at about 14 I think I'm using this particular wireless lab system at 17 so in my experience each external microphone has a different level and it's just kind of trial and error to figure out what that is so let's talk about some some some microphone options for the Vixia so the 3.5 mil or eighth jack does not supply any power so there's two types of power that microphone ports typically produce whether we're talking about 3.5 eighth jacks or XLR jacks one of them is called a plug-in power PIP and that's a low voltage DC supply running up to 10 volts I think it's more typically in the two to four volt territory so it's a really really small amount of electricity and that powers microphones and you'll typically see microphones like a lot of the road mics they list on their product specs no battery required that is a warning that it's not going to work with the Vixia HFR 800 because in order for microphones to operate they need to have power somehow that power is either going to be coming from the port to which they're connected or they're going to have an internal power supply so in terms of microphones that are compatible with the Vixia HFR 800 you could make a list but it's easier to just understand the text specifications any microphone which delivers its own power and that's basically through an internal battery so this lav mic system I'm wearing it's charged up by you know type c usb and therefore it's got a little small lithium battery built in and as I'm using it the receiver has a battery and that is carrying the the audio signal into the camcorder now here's another option if you want to use a wired lav mic I mean I have a bunch of these but just to kind of show a few of these here is a pretty not so special mammon system but you can see it's got this cylinder here and there's two settings off and camera and you want to turn it onto camera if you have a system like this now the reason is that you see how it says off smartphone so that's basically saying that okay if this lavalier system expects that if it's connected to a smartphone the smartphone is going to be putting out a pip power supply through that 3.5 millimeter jack therefore it doesn't need to give it own power from the battery however that's why there is a camera setting and what the camera setting is doing is turning on the internal battery it's one of those small button batteries and if I were to plug if I were to hook myself up to this lav mic and put the 3.5 mil jack into the bixia I would see nothing on the lavalometer if it was off and as soon as I turned it on I would start seeing levels because it has to mean that's day to work now there's tons and tons of these lavalier wired lav mics 3.5 mil this is a big old one it's about kind of I'd say there's two or three meters so you know the downfall of a wired system is obviously that there's a wire however versus wireless systems you're running into less problems with interference particularly given that that 2.5 band is pretty cluttered nowadays with that Wi-Fi signals and that so you've got a ton of options for wireless lav for both actually wired and wireless at lavalier microphones with this particular camcorder so this is just one that I have in my kit bag and kind of ready to go for an interview now the next thing I want to show in this kind of microphone show and tell if you will is what happens if you want to use multiple mics so the bixia hf r800 only has a single 3.5 mil input so it does not mean that you can't use multiple microphones here's kind of a workaround here's what's called a passive mixer this is the andur at ws v2 I picked this up on ebay for about 10 or 20 bucks something like that now what this guy does it has a cold shoe at the bottom which is handy for if you're using something like a scorpion grip for accessorizing and it has a two inputs here left right and it's got one 3.5 mil egg putt and you've got two gain trims on the front and you've got a m and you've got a ms switch which is going between mono and stereo now let me just explain a few things about this outputting mono to stereo if you're outputting to mono through device like this you plug in your boat you plug in two microphones into left and right you set the levels of each microphone each channel on this now if you set the output trim to stereo each microphone you're going to get this is going to put a stereo track into the bixia hf r800 and each microphone is going to be on its own channel microphone one on channel left microphone two on channel right that means that in post-production you're going to be able to actually manipulate so turn off one microphone by just cutting out or silencing the channel for a portion of the audio and turning on one microphone so this allows you to bring two external microphones now there is a caveat this is a passive mixer that means that it doesn't have any power in it it's just literally a piece of plastic with some circuitry inside of it and it passively draws its power from the microphone so you're the same rules as apply for standard external microphones apply here in other words you're going to need microphones with their own power in order to in order for them to work with this but if you want to connect two microphones I haven't seen passive mixers with three or four different inputs on the market although I'm sure if you look hard enough they exist there's also active mixers here's another accessory in my microphone kit bag that I've played around with a little bit this is a piece of gear called the saramonic smart rig now what this guy has is an XLR input on this side this is the smart rig two XLR in here it's got a 3.5 out here and it's got a 3.5 out here for monitoring you've got a gain trim and you've got a switch for 48 48 volt phantom power I've just turned it on and now you can see the lights are on and now I've just gone off the 48 volt light's gone off and now I'm going to turn it off so I don't drain the battery now this guy works on a 9 volt battery one of those big chunky batteries so what you can do here so you're you might be thinking well I can't use an XLR microphone with the Vixia HFR 800 or I can't use a microphone which even if I could use XLR I couldn't use one of phantom power definitely not true all you need to do is get yourself one of these guys plug in your XLR microphone requiring phantom here set the gain here and you can either monitor on this device the smart rig or you can monitor through the camcorder and that this so this will allow you once you have this you can connect essentially any external microphone into the Vixia HFR 800 okay I don't make this video super long so I'm going to just try rush through the rest of the microphones in my kit bag here's something called the saramonic cam mic plus I've got the dead cat on it now this is a uh saramonic do make a couple of these cam mics one of them doesn't have phantom power sorry it doesn't have its own battery the other one does and only the one with the battery does it's saramonic cam mic plus I think it's the cam mic that doesn't have the battery this has a little switch and there's an internal battery I think it's something like a triple a battery that goes in here and again the the key when you're looking for what external microphone will work with the Vixia is does it have a battery that battery can either be a literal literal cell battery or it can be a battery that charges up via the mains which is just a lithium battery that's charging from power so once it's got a battery it's got its own power supply it can deliver power into the camcorder it's going to work if it expects power in some way you're either going to need something like this and by the way there's another saramonic smart rig um I think it's the next one up in the series it has a 3.5 in as well so that will actually allow you to use everything including 3.5 mil microphones that need passive passive power supply you just run them through this um here's another uh boy uh this is pretty much the same as the as the mammon wire there are lots lots lots of these on the market I think this one is slightly better it's got a um internal button battery and power uh so there's that now in terms of wireless systems as I said at the start of this video I'm currently wearing one here's another one that I have um this is a little bit more versatile this one has a built-in lavalier so you can't pull the lab out of the transmitter you can get at these RXTX systems where you've got a receiver this is from Maono as well and I've just kind of put labels on them for uh to show what what each of these is um and this will allow you to these will work because they have a power supply um in them so when you turn it on you can see that that's lighting up so and this guy takes a charge again this is your clue so this would be useful um you can either use these all of these guys now kind of work as their own um lapel microphones or you can plug in an external 3.5 mil uh microphone there there might be there is on the market a um wireless system that'll take in uh XLR and put out 3.5 I believe uh but I don't own it uh I don't own it yet so okay that was the um that was the mammon um and there is a course now I've kind of spread my money cheaply and widely by which I mean I bought a bunch of uh relatively inexpensive microphones just to test them all out you can find better quality products in all these categories like the road uh wireless systems would be a lot better than that $50 one I'm certain so here's another thing you can use here's just another thing on my gear this is a wireless UHF system it's kind of a reporter interviewer mic it's got a 3.5 out this is by Bietroon and it's got UHF here so this guy works as well now as I said you're going to need to figure out the levels for each of these or uh better better strategy is just invest in a pair of monitoring headphones getting near getting near to the end um here is a uh relatively inexpensive shotgun microphone this is actually an Ali express one so like this is like a $10 shotgun it's kind of mini but it's got its own power supply that will work and finally the last uh actually two more microphones to show in my in my kit bag this I got because it's a really interesting concept this is the comic attract shot and it's got two different uh shotgun microphones so one of these can be rotated to face you so now you've got one arm one shotgun arm facing out one shotgun arm facing back it requires charge it's got a little lcd display here so clearly this is a microphone that will work levels are always finicky especially when you've got a system like this where you've got levels both on on board the microphone and then you need to also set them in the vixia so that requires a little bit of adjustment to get to the right level and last but not least we have a super super useful tool the zoom h1n this is a field recorder very very popular advice among filmmakers but it can actually be used as a microphone with the vixia and the way you do that is as follows there is a line out and all you need is a 3.5 mil mail to mail cable in order to patch this audio through to the camcorder it's also got a line in so another thing you can do is to run a microphone like a lav mic into this record directly onto this and then sync and post but you can also simultaneously patch it out to the vixia hfr 800 that's pretty much it I mean relative to a you know I'm looking at upgrading to a better camcorder with xlr etc so if you have something like that you it kind of cuts out a lot of work you don't need to worry about the the power requirements for each microphone you don't need to use accessories like this to get xlr mics into the camcorder so it just makes it easier to run and go and have something that you know is going to work with pretty much everything but as I hope I've kind of shown in this video you can still use pretty much every type of microphone with the vixia hfr 800 if you just pay attention to the specs of this video is useful if you'd like to get more videos from me please subscribe to this youtube channel