How to Set Canon XH A1 Audio Levels Manually

Video Transcript

"Now I'm going to talk about setting manual levels. Like I said, this is what I recommend because I always like to be in complete control of both my picture and my audio. So, I'm always using the manual levels. I take the time, before I shoot, to get those set. I don't just want to go in there with auto levels and hope that everything is alright. Let me show you how to set your manual levels. Just like we were looking at before, our audio levels are right here. When they're on A, then they're on manual but when I switch them to M. Excuse me, when they're on A its automatic. If I switch them to M, now we're on our manual levels and these are set right here by our channel one and channel two audio dials. Basically, you see there's a little dot system from small to bigger and obviously it gets louder when you go bigger. You can set the level for each individual channel. So, let's actually set the levels, you can watch them over here on our power dial. You can see right now, we're talking now, right around that twelve which is a medium range. I would probably set those a little bit higher. You can see, now, I'm only going to channel one just a little bit higher. You can see if I talk really loud, I go all the way to the top, and that's called peaking. You definitely don't want peaking because it's going to cause distortion. The best recommendation I can give for setting audio levels is just to try to hear the softest and the loudest thing you think you'll be hearing when your shooting, and set it to the loudest. You don't want anything to peak but you want to have high audio levels. If anything is too low, like this, you can see, well, that's completely off but let me turn it up a little bit. When it's really low like that, obviously it's just really low and when you get it back into your computer, you?re not going to be able to hear things very well. The ambient noise in the room is going to be closer to your voices. You have to set your audio levels a little bit higher to get good audio, but you definitely want to try to avoid peaking at all possible. So, it's kind of a fine art, just play with it. One thing I might suggest is that you can set your channel one and your channel two to different levels. Maybe set your channel two really high just in case, all of a sudden, you have really loud noises, and then your channel one will come really high and your two will start peaking. But, in post, maybe you just get rid of channel two and you double up channel one. So, that's something to think about, but, usually you'll probably want to set them to the same level and make sure you're setting them to the loudest noise you think you'll be hearing."