Cannon XL2 Transport cable
 

What is the reccomended cable to deliver the best (broadcast quaility) signal.
My application is a three camera shot, going into a video mixer, and onto tape.
Will S-video give me the quaility? What other options do I have?

Greg,
In order to keep the 'best' output possible from you XL-2 you would have to stay digital and that means Firewire from the camera to the capture device or mixer.

As soon as you come out of the camera through S-video (or composite) you have now changed the output from digital to analog and your signal quality (while still quite good) is now limited by the analog format capabilities. While digital maintains a horizontal color resolution of 720, the S-video horizontal color resolution is 120-140.

Looking at imagery from an XL-2 sent S-video to a monitor, the image looks good, but it won't stand up as weel to many of the post-production things you might want to do with that video, like pan and scan.

Connection preference:
First choice is digital (e.g. DV) at 720 x 480
Second choice is component video (Y/Pb/Pr), or RGB
Third choice is S-video (Y/C)
Distant fourth choice is composite video (yellow video jack)

Double-post. Moderator please delete.

use BNC - if you use high quality cable, it should be fine for live use and that's what bnc is there for. It's designed for broadcast use and if you're moving the camera around, it won't get yanked out - it's also meant for long runs, which you won't be able to do with any of the others.

Andrew,
Actually, the BNC output is Composite and not even S-video or Component. IT is actually the lowest quality, though you are correct in that it is the most secure connector.

What's confusing is that in higher end cams there are BNC connectors also, but they are BNC Component and not like the XL-2 BNC Composite output.

I agree, BNC is the lowest quality, however, the problem is that S-video and firewire cannot be run for the same lengths as BNC can. For example, the large church I run video for uses XL2s and we run the cables around 300 feet without any problems. The image at the end looks beautiful and we did try S-video with poorer results. If the distance is shorter, than yes, S-video will be much better.

Yep, you're right about the distance thing. We've been toying with changing to Firewire runs to all four of our XL cams and getting a Firewire input mixer, but we are looking at having to add repeaters inline because of the distances we are having to run the wire. And the added expense there isn't so bad, but the repeaters require power, so you have to run that also.