 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel Daniel Rosso here I want to do a video today about a interesting shotgun microphone that you can use in combination with the Canon Vixia HFR-800 camcorder now I am a really really big fan of the Canon Vixia HFR-800 when I decided two years ago I wanted to learn about video which is very much an ongoing process I was looking for a camcorder that I could afford But that was by a decent brand and also that had an external Microphone input that I could play around with different microphones and not just be limited to the internal microphone on the camcorder The Canon Vixia HFR-800 ticked all those boxes And I think that for a lot of people when you're looking at the camcorder market If you don't want to go down the DSLR or mirrorless direction there's this big gap on the market between this which is a great entry-level tool and then the Prosumer and professional camcorders that cost upwards of $1,000. It's a lot of money for most people So I've been experimenting with different external shotgun microphones to use with this and a microphone that I Was fascinated by was the Comica track shot. The Comica track shot is a Transformational dual shotgun microphone. So it's got two shotguns here mounted on the top It's got a little LCD screen on the back that gives you levels and this is compatible with the Canon Vixia HFR-800 Basically any microphone that supplies its own power is going to work with the Vixia If the microphone requires power whether that's phantom power 48-fold or plug-in power It's not going to work but once the microphone supplies its own power somehow it doesn't matter whether that's a Battery or it's got a rechargeable built-in lithium battery like this then it's going to work just fine So this this is a really interesting one It's got a little power switch here And once you press that the the microphone comes to life now It's got a gain wheel here So this is a little bit Complicated because when you're using external microphones with the Canon Vixia HFR-800 You want to move the microphone out of automatic mode and put it into manual mode Usually there isn't a gain level on the microphone So when you're using these two guys in combination you've actually got two levels to set Firstly you can see as I'm speaking the levels are reading on the actual microphone So the first thing you want to do is get the levels set to an appropriate setting here The wheel goes from zero to ten. So I've got it set at about seven. It's a little bit too high Five but somewhere between five. Let's go back to five Now that I'm at five. I'm not getting any reds. I'm getting into the kind of oranges And that looks fairly okay to me Now the next thing that you want to do to use this and is as I said you want to go into the settings menu on the Canon Vixia And you want to make sure that your microphone level is set to Manual M. So if it's reading a then you need to go out of automatic and go into manual mode Now what he would say is that it's a trial and error process So now I'm going to just go ahead and connect the microphone So what I've done I discussed this before I bought something called a cold adhesive mount you get these on Amazon for like 10 bucks and It just basically sticks on because the Canon Vixia HFR 800 Inconveniently doesn't have any cold shoes. So this thing has worked fairly well for me so far Nothing has come off. Everything's been pretty solid. So this is a cold shoot the base So all you need to do then is just literally screw it into this shoe and then this this bit can be a bit finicky it's got kind of a tightening wheel and These are super sensitive to vibration. So as you can see it's probably jittering around a little bit there you go it's now on and The beauty about this microphone and why I thought it was a cool idea is it's very versatile So because you've got your two arms You can either have them both facing outward So let's say you're recording an interview subject in front of you or you can actually swivel both arms Now something I couldn't see in YouTube videos I couldn't find videos where someone where someone had both arms facing backwards So I had to comment on people's videos to ask me to do it so you can so now as you can see I'm shooting this way, but I've got the Transformational arms backwards and you can do one and one so I can push one Arm of the microphone forward have one arm backwards. It does look a bit funky But it works. So now I'm getting audio capture both from me as I'm speaking and if I'm interviewing If I want to be capturing sound outwards again, these things are really really jittery But that's just the way that it is. So the next thing so after I've set the gain on the actual microphone itself The next thing you want to do is adjust the gain levels on the manual mode So it's been a trial-and-error process. I figured out that level 14 was the best I figured that out because when I'm not speaking The levels are zero when I'm speaking there's somewhere between minus 12 and minus zero in that kind of Orange zone you don't want to get to zero or the red zone usually on a level meter So that looks just about right to me. So I set the two levels got them in coordination and When I pull out the sound clips from my SD card, it sounds pretty good By contrast if I use the automatic mic levels on the Vixia Even if I've got the level dialed in perfectly on the microphone the audio is unusable So you basically have to set a manual level and I picked that tip up Thankfully by asking what was going wrong in the Canon form I was using my first External microphones on this camcorder and everything sounded horrible I thought it was the microphones and they said no if you're using an external microphone with the Vixia You need to set the levels manually Hope that video was useful if you're looking for a shotgun microphone that can be used with the Canon Vixia HFR 800 This is kind of my current favorite the one I've been going to and I think it's a great microphone It charges via USB type-c and in a couple of hours You'll have a decent store of power in the microphone and it works with the Vixia Thank you guys for watching to get more videos from me. 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