 Hi guys welcome back to my YouTube channel this is Daniel Rossell here and I want to do for today a video about how to connect multiple external microphones to your Canon Vixia HF-R800 camcorder. Now the Canon Vixia HF-R800 does have external mic input and that allows us to connect external microphones which is super useful because not a lot of camcorders at its price point even have that feature however the external microphone jack is on power so therefore you can't you have to use a certain type of microphone that means that the microphone has to supply it on power that can either be a battery microphone like the shotgun microphone it has a little AAA battery there and therefore this provides the power that makes this microphone work a lot of microphones expect power from the camcorder either phantom power 48 volts or plug-in power which is a lower DC current those will not work out of the box but there is a workaround and that's that is actually using one of these mixers a certain type of mixer the other type of microphone you might see or attach is one that will have be charged these days via you know USB like the comic track shot so that will work too the microphone just has to be powered now with one microphone input you can only get one microphone unless you use a mixer there's two types of mixers camcorder mixer is that you'll see on the market one of them is an unpowered or passive mixer this doesn't actually have any electrical circuitry within it what it does instead it'll take in 3.5 millimeter inputs and it will mix it down or preserve them as separate tracks now that's why there is a mono stereo switch so if you have this switch to stereo you've got your two microphones and it'll keep each input on a different track of the stereo track at outputs and that'll allow you to change levels in post-production which is super useful and it's got two gain trims on the front so you can adjust the levels for each microphone so what I'm going to do for I'm just going to build out the setup quickly I've got an L bracket here I've got my Canon Vixi HFR 800 on an L bracket now I also did another video showing how to connect an adhesive cold shoe and that's another approach that you can take I'm going to put the passive mixer on the L bracket just today it's a little bit more solid so this is a passive mixer it's again pretty it's not so expensive but if you want to use an active one this is why I mentioned the microphone problem is the Vixia because this is actually a workaround what you could do is if you have an active mixer and Saramonic make one called a smart rig that has XLR and it's got a battery so that will actually provide there's a little phantom power switch on that product and that will actually power a microphone so once you've got an active or powered mixer camcorder mixer you could actually just use that for one microphone you don't actually need to use it as a mixer and that would allow you to use absolutely any microphone with the Vixia HFR 800 so just a tip but I'm actually going to be doing real mixing today so firstly the second tip is you want to have the gain trim so this is my rig I've got my lens here monitor screen here so therefore I want to have my gain trims accessible in a way that I can touch them so that's why I'm going to put it this way so a little bit tricky to do this with one hand I'm just going to pop down the or pop up the lens cover here that's stable enough as best as I can do it for this demo so I've got the output from the passive mixer I'm just going to run it around the back and into the microphone input on the Vixia so here's what that looks like from the side so it's running into the microphone jack now now the this passive mixer which is the and doer uh ws v2 actually handily has three different cold shoes kind of built into it so just for the purposes of demonstration I'm going to firstly attach a shotgun microphone a really basic one like this I'm going to run it around the side and put it actually mounted on the passive mixer again I could get these a lot more secure I'm just doing a minimal valuable product for the video and I'm putting it into the left channel so now I've got one microphone going into the passive mixer I'm going to be using just for demo again but here would be a more logical setup you could have this so this is your shotgun microphone and that's going into left therefore I adjust it with the left channel here a more logical setup would be to have let's say a shotgun microphone recording outwards and let's say you wanted to rig up an interview subject with a lavalier microphone alternatively you could have a shotgun microphone facing back and you could have the lavalier the purpose of that setup would be that if I rotated this shotgun microphone 180 it would be recording me and picking up audio from me the interviewer and let's say another shotgun would be picking up audio from the interview subject or that could be a wireless lav receiver is the other example I gave so those are real life instances where this kind of two microphone recording into the camcorder would make sense and all you have to do to adjust the proportion of audio is play around whoops with the gain tab so I'm just going to connect a second microphone here I'm going to connect the comic a track shot slide it into the colchee here and I'm going to connect that to I'm not even going to tighten it I'm just going to slide and hope it stays there we go so now it's connected so I have microphone one facing outwards microphone two facing back and I'm going to actually show you guys something cool despite the fact that the passive mixer is unpowered it does carry electricity through so once your once your microphones work or can be powered they're going to work with the vixia so I'm just going to show you guys right now there's no audio level you can see the levels are zero in fact if I flip this right and it'll be better so no levels are being picked up because both microphones are turned off but neither microphone is connected directly they're both running through the mixer watch what happens when I turn on the shotgun microphone here turn on the switch and now one sec now we should be getting levels through the mixer and if I turn it up we can see those levels are getting higher and watch what happens if I just turn down the level on the mixer to zero we're getting no levels again into the camcorder and now I'm playing with the gain tab and the levels are picking up again and I can turn on so this way I can adjust both microphones using these tabs and I've got two microphones connected so that's a way to get your two microphones connected to the Canon Vixia HF-R800 camcorder I hope this video was helpful and if you would like to subscribe hit the subscribe button for more videos thank you for watching