I am not an XL1S owner (yet), but was checking out a friend's unit. He said he hated that the shotgun mic becomes disabled when you plug an external mic into any of the audio inputs. What?!?!? That sounds amazingly poor in design to me. Is this true? Is there a way around it?

Also, is there a way to display the audio meters in the viewfinder?

Sure you can run audio 1 and audio 2 simultaneously with the use of the optional XLR adapter. You must dumb down the sampling rate to 12 bit, then scroll through the mix options using the button nearby the V.U.: stereo1, stereo2, or mix. Multiple passes are then needed when capturing to get both sets of stereo tracks. This requires intimate knowledge of your capture software, but after you have done it the first time ... piece of cake.

Check out the XL1 owners manual ... the pdf is at the Canon site.

As for viewfinder info, this does not exist. An expensive set of headphones is the best way to monitor. Dancing vu meters are great to confirm connected sources only.

J.

The statement does not reflect the XL1 design.

The XL1 does not have an "internal" mic that is automatically disabled when an external device is connected. The XL1 standard mic is an external stereo mic, not a shotgun. This mic conencts to a 3.5mm stereo mini phone jack, and a power conenctor.

As an alternative to the mic input, one can connect a different audio source (e.g., wireless, different mics) to the Audio1 input (also stereo) and select it as the recorded audio (at MIC, MIC ATT, or consumer line levels), in which case the mic input is deselected. The selections are made manually.

If you want to use a wireless and a mono shotgun mic, you can using the Auido 1 input.

As Jimmy notes, the XL1 also offers a 4-channel recording mode., you could use the XL1 standard mic for stereo ambient, and feed a wirelss and shotgun to the Audio2 inputs.

The rub is many NLE systems do not support easy capture of 4-channel sound.

However, the XL1 does not include an audio mixer.

You have the same problem with any of the other camcorders in its class.

However, the XL-1 does have 4-track mode that reduces audio resolution down to 12 bit. Yes you can tell the difference but not easily and for many applications this is not a problem.

I use this mode frequently since I like to operate with both the shotgun and wireless mics. It is very handy not to have to drag around an extra recorder and everything that goes with it!

The NLE package I have supports Canon 4-track, but many other NLEs do not. There is a package called Scenalyzer (www.scenalyzer.com) that will do the trick just fine.

Does premier pro support having 4 audio tracks in the DV footage? I know Pinnacle Edition does.

Thanks
Donie

Page 63 of the Premiere Pro manual states "Although the DV format can record two independent stereo audio pairs, you cannot capture the Stereo 2 pair in Windows. "

I believe this indicates that you cannot do it with the native Windows IEEE1394 capture drivers. A third party capture driver/system is needed.

Once captured, Premiere does allow many audio tracks on the timeline during editing.

Is there any utility software out there that can log the footage with all the audio. I'd rather not have to use Edition to log the footage as I'm sticking with Premier and I'd like a more streamlined solution.