I know this has been discussed before (last I read you had to hack the cable)... but I was looking at some behind the scenes footage on a high budget "P" grade dvd the other day and I saw they had two XL1's and they had two external monitors set up for the director and both were showing all the info from the view finder (exposure meter, f-stop, blah blah blah)... have I just missed something? Is there a way to get that info out of the camera without hacks? Maybe they did hack them, I just wouldn't think they would have.

Pressing the EVF Display button twice will make those things disappear. One push removes everything but the tape speed and time code; two pushes and it's all gone. :)

No magic. Just connect the analog output from the camcorder to a monitor and you get it. The trick to seeing the actual exposure is to be using a manual exposure mode. The display in the upper left corner shows the mode and shutter/aperture settings where user set, and the gain is in the center left. If you are in the auto or green box mode all you see is the word auto or a white box on the monitor.

Hi Lorinda,

Which finger shall I use? The big one or the little one? :-))

The answer to that, dear Owen, is highly subjective, so I'll leave it up to you to experiment and see which works best for you. ;)

But after reading Don's answer it looks like maybe I completely misunderstood the question! LOL

We remove the data same way as you Lorinda. You can also use the 'on screen' button on the remote.

Also Kevin did you know you can run two monitors out. One via the 'S' socket, the other via the composite, and of course there ia a third option via the firewire.

Umm we just did a shoot the other day and used RCA video outs and exposure stuff was NOT in the external monitors but we did have it in the view finder. XL1s btw.

I believe you have to do that with your remote control, to show it (and make it completely dissapear) We once had the opposite problem, where we used our xl1 for a small live event and the footage was directly shown on a big screen. But the remote control was in the other xl1 bag, so my collegue had to do the whole event with al that info for the crowd to see :(