 Hey guys welcome back to my YouTube channel this is Daniel Rossell here another video today on the Canon XA40 Pro camcorder and what I want to demonstrate today is how you can record two XLR microphones into the camera at the same time. So I was asking question on the Canon XA user group on Facebook that I'm a member of when I was recording the flag march last week I had the shotgun attached as I always do and when I wanted to use a reporter's handheld microphone I was actually plugging out this from the from its XLR port which is input one here on the right I'm putting that in and that just felt wrong I knew that wasn't the best workflow so what people said you should do if you want to use two microphones you actually just have them both in the camera at the same time and you can separate them out in post-production so in other words I'd have the two going and if I wanted to just use dynamic I'd just cut out that so I want to show exactly how that works so first thing let me show you what I've done here and I know it's a little bit hard to see with all the background clutter on my desk unfortunately this is the best place I have currently to do these YouTube videos so I have the shotgun microphone there this Boya microphone that's running into XLR one and XLR two for the purpose of simplicity I've just used this lav mic okay now just to show you how the top handle audio controls are set up here firstly extremely importantly you want to have your top handle audio on I'm using automatic gain control for both microphones and I'm using 48 volt phantom power for both channels because they both need it now that's the hardware and let me show you what I want to do on the software level and just to demonstrate what we're picking up what I'm going to do is the classic tap test as I call it in other words just tap the microphone tap the microphone here sorry for the drilling in the background this is driving it drives me crazy in Israel there is constantly renovations going on so watch what I'm going to go do here it's very important I'm going to click into menu and then I'm going to jump over to the sound menu and if you see the setup here the first I'm going to actually use this this guy to scroll here channel two input the very very first option on the menu this is essential if you are using two XLR microphones simultaneously you want to put channel two sorry you want to put input two to channel two if you are only using one microphone you want to disregard whatever is connected into the second input you want to just set this to input one so input two goes over to channel two and let me just get out of this firstly but just explain quickly again what we're doing here this is input one the one closest to the top of the camera this is input two so input one is my shotgun microphone input two is my lavalier microphone okay so now that that's set up correctly have a look at my level meter and look at what you're seeing we can see channel one and channel two here lest enough be clear I'm just going to point out what you're looking at channel one is on the top and channel two is on the bottom so you've got two independent levels now watch what happens I'm going to go ahead and just do my little tapping stuff here and watch what happens to the audio levels now I'm going to go ahead and do my tap test on the lavalier microphone and what you should see happening it's a little bit might be a little bit hard to see but let me actually put this in frame what basically it's happening is that as I'm tapping on the lavalier microphone channel two is jumping and as I'm tapping on this microphone on the shotgun microphone channel two is a channel one is jumping and then when I go into post-production I'll get my two microphones on two different tracks and if I want to use just one microphone I can just cut the other one out very easily in post-production now if I want to go back to using it just as one and this is important to do this because otherwise you're going to get your microphone only on you're going to get one-sided audio so I need to set it back it's going to disconnect the lavalier microphone now go back to the audio menu go into channel two input and I'm routing channel two input now over to input one now I'm exiting out of this and now you can see the differences that my two levels are in synchrony that's because it's just and I'm tapping the shotgun it's just reading from the shotgun microphone so that's how you can record two different XLR microphones simultaneously using the Canon XA40 professional camcorder. Okay to show you guys how this looks in post-production so I recorded a test clip from the camera with both shotgun and the lavalier microphone the two XLRs now I did only use two channel recording so if I had done four channel recording I could have got a dual channel track for each of the two microphones what I've done here is separate them and you can see I'm just going to screw up through this clip here so you can see this is where I'm tapping the shotgun microphone and you can see that there is these taps on the top channel that's the shotgun's channel and the lavalier microphone there's nothing and then I bring the lavalier microphone up to my mouth and you can see there is a sudden increase in the levels here on the lav mic the shotgun is relatively flat-ish and then at the end I pull the lavalier away from my mouth and therefore seeing roughly roughly roughly roughly equal levels between the top track which is shotgun and the lower track here which represents the lavalier microphone