HDV & DC Audio Recording on a Canon XH A1

"Now I'm going to talk about your options for recording audio when you're using your on-board microphone. If you're shooting an SD, which stands for Standard Definition, you have two options and let me show you those. I'm going to hit the menu button and then just scroll down to our audio set-up and here are our options right here. DV audio, so click that. See we have two options, 16 bit and 12 bit. A 16 bit audio has a sampling frequency of 48 kilohertz and a 12 bit audio has a sampling frequency of 32 kilohertz. Just from my post production background, I almost use 48 kilohertz, 16 bit audio, and that's what I would recommend for you. It's higher quality than 32. But, if you do record in 12 bit audio mode, only audio channels one and two are your recording leaving the other channels available for adding a new audio track. So, if you need to do that, experiment with it and see if it works for you. If your shooting HD, you pretty much just have the one option and it's 48 kilohertz, it's the higher quality. According to the manual that's a transfer rate of 384 kilobits per second. Let me switch back to HD, because, I really think that's what you should be shooting in anyway. And, you should already know how to do this. I'm just going to quickly go through it. Switch our system to HD. Now when we go into our audio set-up we don't have those options any more because it's a standard 48 kilohertz. That's a few audio options when recording with your on-board microphone."