Bnc?
 

What is this thing I've circled in this picture. The only thing that is mentioned in the XL2 manual is that it can be switched to RCA or BNC. Is BNC SDI? Composite? I hate it when the manuals don't specify this stuff. It's probably due to my inexperience in this stuff.

Here's the picture of what I'm talking about

Composite BNC...great for going to an NTSC field monitor.

KW

Ahhh... OK OK... I got it. So, it's not used for capturing then at all right?

Well, it could be used for 'analog' video capture. But then, so could the S-Video connector.

-gb-

Yeah... But why would anyone want to capture that way right? With the XL2 just hook up the firewire and off you go right? There's not a better way then that is there?

Just used both of my XL-2 cameras a month ago for a live switched shoot fed to projectors on each side of stage. We used the BNC outputs because it's easier to do long cable runs. BNC is what you will find for composite video connections on a lot of higher end equipment. I suspect that's why Canon chose to include one as an alternative to just the RCA and S-Video jacks.

Another situation that could come into play is if you have footage to give the local news stations. Their equipment doesn't usually have firewire so you have to feed them with the composite bnc connector. That's about the only capture scenario I could think of.

-gb-

Cool. Thanks for the info. That connector was really bugging me! haha. Ya know.. cause I didn't know what it did. :)

What does it take to convert from rca to bnc or the other way around ?

There are cables that do that sort of thing. Here, check this out.

Cables

The BNC connector is on the XL2 (and XL H1) primarily to serve as a monitor connection.

You could capture from it, but that's not why they put it there. It's there because pro monitors use BNC.

Chris - would this be a decent field monitor to connect to the BNC connection?

JVC Monitor

That's pretty straightforward Michael. You could even use a push on adapter. I think I still have some lying around, in fact. They are both 2 pin connections with the signal being the center pin and the ground being the outer ring.

-gb-

Any good sized electronics store will have adapters that will take you from BNC to RCA, RCA to S-Video and back the other way. I like to keep a set of them in my grip bag.