Hey, Lucinda. Yes, the XL2 has a BNC connection. On my first shoot with my XL2 we used a BNC cable.
As for the monitor coming with any video cable that would be nice. I've never heard of that. Maybe they're simply talking about the power cable?
Yeah, I once went the DVD player route as well. They're good for framing and not much more.
The Varizoom is definitely nicer than a cheapy DVD player. Better res' and more accurate colors. It's certainly not the best monitor on the market but it's good for the money.

I find that a S-Video connection gives better quality than a composite connection like BNC.

*I'm not talking about a SDI signal over BNC. Or component signals over three BNC cables.

So Eric, you're saying that the JVC comes with no RCA cables, S video?...

got my sony PVM14L1...no cables.

wonder about this cable question. does't everybody has differents needs/ lenght etc?

greetings

I have the S-Video, RCA cables, but no BNC.....

I'm really looking forward to having this. I've been using a 13" RCA TV and this will certainly be an improvement.

Lucinda, you might want to pickup some BNC-RCA adapters if your equipment uses RCA plugs.

Actually you may not need to do this if you just use a S-video cable... I think the JVC has that connector. You might want to check the manual to see what it has in the back.

I prefer to use both Y-C/S-video and RCA/BNC/composite so I can monitor for chroma crawl on the inferior composite connection. Or you can have multiple things hooked up to the monitor.

cablewholesale.com seems to be a decent place to pickup cables and stuff if you're in the US.

Lucinda, the JVC does indeed have the BNC connector in the rear as well as S-video. Both will work fine. But alas, Glenn is correct! I had it completely backwards (gotta lay off the spiked eggnog!) S-video cable is superior to BNC cable. (single cable out/in)
Nice upgrade from the RCA tv by the way...how did you manage to shoot 16:9 on a 4:3 without it looking like a Sergio Leone movie! Ha Ha! Best of luck with the monitor!
Karl, greetings to you as well. Different needs can dictate different cable usage (length, type, etc) in different situations. For Lucinda's purposes she really just needs to keep it simple and use either the BNC or the S-video cable.

Drinking the ol eggnog already?! wow. Anyway, thanks for the tip about the S-Video cables, I do have them.

There's something I don't understand, I'm working in 16:9 since getting the XL2 and watching on the computer and the RCA TV. I see no elongation of the imagery on the TV.....also there are no settings on the TV for 16:9, too old a unit. How come it doesn't distort the picture more?

I want to wish you all a very Merry and Happy Holiday Season. Good for me 'cause it gives me more time to work! Yea!

Lucinda

i agree
 

Lot of work for me too to get the job done and meet deadlines during holidays.

Well, I have the JVC color monitor and it does have great resolution! thanks Eric for the tip!

I do have a few questions tho'. There's a white dashed line across the top of the clip in 16:9, wondering what that is.....hope it won't record out to tape or dvd when I make backups or final video?

Also, should I take my Canon XL2 and match the color bars on the color monitor to the XL2's color bars? I notice that the clips on the computer look the same as the clips on the JVC color monitor, so I'm not sure whether I need to do this with the camcorder matching or not?

Eric, if you have any advice on any of the settings let me know. I'm reading the manual and will try different things, altho' things look pretty good at the factory settings.

Thanks again and Happy New Year to all!

Lucinda

There are calibration instructions at:
http://www.videouniversity.com/tvbars2.htm

2- I'm not sure what you're talking about in reference to camcorder matching.

3- If you want, you can try the following tests on your monitor:
A- Put up a well-exposed black and white image. There should not be color casts on the monitor, and you should not see reflections of room lights.
Easiest way to do this is to drop the color corrector on color footage from your editing system. Then de-saturate fully.

B- Look away for seven seconds. Then look at the monitor- do the highlights appear white?

C- Look at your editing system's computer monitor for seven seconds. Then look at the monitor- do the highlights appear white?
If the highlights are not white, you'll probably find that they will start looking white after several seconds.

To fix that, you may be able to change the white points of the various monitors in the room.

Hi Glenn,

What I meant was that the XL2 has color bars and I wonder if I should try to match the JVC monitor's color bars with the XL2's to get the correct color.

You should probably use the color bars generated by your editing system.

Unfortunately color bars can be incorrent depending on how they program handles things. Usually I think you can assume a program's color bars generator is correct (maybe except for the vegas 4ish era).

Glenn,

It looks really close when I look at a clip in Premiere and then look at the monitor...looks exactly the same in fact. So, this is the default settings from the factory. Do you think I should just leave as is?

Lucinda,
You should probably calibrate the monitor. The link earlier has instructions.

2- I would also test the monitor as outlined in my previous message.

I would try to use a real world image (not a test pattern) turned into black and white.