5 things I love about shooting with the Canon XA45

For a DoP who's right at home behind a full-size Cinema EOS rig, Peter Demetris is highly impressed by the potential of Canon's latest camcorder: the Canon XA45. "Having so many professional features on a tiny camcorder is just fantastic," he says.

The latest XA-series camcorder is certainly compact compared to Peter's Canon EOS C300 Mark III, but downsizing doesn't mean sacrificing performance. With its extensive professional feature set, including a 20x optical zoom lens, XF-AVC codec, and XLR and 3G-SDI connectors, the Canon XA45 punches above its weight.

Peter was an ideal choice to put the XA45 through its paces on a music video shoot, due to his background in both live broadcast and narrative productions. His route to becoming a self-shooting DoP began in his native Australia, where he served stints as a video technician, vision mixer and studio director, specialising in entertainment shows and multi-cam events. After relocating to London, his focus shifted to more narrative work, including a work-in-progress documentary on the making of Lost in London – the world's first feature film to be broadcast live – on which he served as live gallery director.

Here, Peter shares his thoughts on the Canon XA45's top five standout features.

To ensure that the high-quality pictures are complemented by finely detailed sound, the Canon XA45 features two XLR inputs on its removable handle. "That makes the XA45 a terrific option for documenting behind the scenes on a small film production," says Peter. "The XLR connectors mean you can put radio mics on the camera. Often when you're working on film shoots, they'll have a radio signal on set that has a mix of the microphones. So, if you borrow a receiver from the sound person, you can shoot behind the scenes and capture all the audio that they're recording."

The Canon XA45 is an ultra-compact camcorder, yet it has a large 4K 20x optical zoom lens, making it suited to a wide range of professional disciplines and productions. "Lenses are the most important thing for me," says Peter. "You have to start with the lens and work backwards, and to have a lens that has the 35mm-equivalent of 29.3-601mm at f/1.8-f/2.8 on such a tiny camcorder is just incredible."

A 2x Digital Teleconverter adds to the lens's versatility, with 5-axis optical image stabilisation ensuring sharp results. "It's really useful to have IS on a camcorder like this, particularly as the current trend is for everything to be on the move rather than static," Peter explains. "If you were shooting a presenter doing a walking piece to camera with the Canon XA45, you could switch on the face detection autofocus and use the 5-axis stabilisation to get a really smooth shot as you walk with them."

One of the advantages of shooting with a professional camcorder is that the autofocus system is optimised for the built-in lens. The Canon XA45 offers a host of focusing setups, including Face Detection and Tracking, Face Only AF, and manual focusing via the lens ring and touchscreen.

Peter admits to a growing admiration for Canon's face-tracking autofocus. "When I got my Canon EOS C300 Mark II, I initially thought that I had no real need for its Face Detection AF. As soon as I got used to it though, I absolutely loved it.

"Although the XA45 doesn't have Dual Pixel CMOS AF, it has a Hybrid AF system that's very, very good. It takes some of the stress out of a shoot when you're working with people, particularly when you're producing, and having to think about the content as well as the framing," says Peter.

Despite being palm-sized, the Canon XA45 makes no compromise in terms of controls, with a three-inch touchscreen, an array of assignable buttons, and a convenient customisable dial. "I try to get everything that I use a lot onto a custom button," says Peter. "So I've got iris control on the dial, and magnification, white balance and photo assigned to three of the buttons.

"For such a small package, it's really versatile. If you're a journalist shooting reportage, or if you're doing travel videos, you could carry the XA45 all day and not even know you've got it on you. It has dual SD card slots, so you can load it up with a couple of large cards, and you can shoot all day using relay recording. The ability to have so much footage in the camera without having to change cards is a real asset for a small camcorder. The batteries last ages, and they're tiny too, so you can easily fit a couple of spares in your pocket.

"The Canon XA45 is also perfectly suited to covert journalism," Peter adds. "If you went around with this camera, I don't think anyone would have a clue what you were doing. It's so compact that you can almost hide it in your jacket."