Thank you all for your replies - pretty much what I thought but very helpful in case I was missing something.

Practising with the camera on 'manual' settings, I think I can decide upon the right balance of exposure between the room interior and window.

However you could perhaps help me out further if I explain a little about what it is I am trying to achieve.

My filming project involves the coverage of several empty rooms in a house. This means I will be setting up on tripod in each room, manually setting the camera, and then making a series of pans and tilts throughout to give as much coverage as possible to these interiors.

So while it would be nice to avoid getting bright windows in shot altogether, you can see it is a necessary part of this project in order to display all the important aspects within the room (including windows).

Okay, so I will manually adjust the camera settings on the XM2 - my next question is: should I set the shutter speed, aperture and gain individually until it looks 'best', or simply adjust 'exposure' (which I understand is essentially all 3 together) and not worry about them individually?

My concern is that I do not currently have a lot of experience with shutter speeds and F-stops - I understand their concept and basic function, but do not know how they should work best together, for this particular project.

If I do choose to set these 3 individually, just so I'm armed with this info could you give an idea of the average/ideal shutter speed for shooting inside a room in good daylight ('normal' for PAL is 1/50?), and F-stop on the aperture (the camera seems to default at around 2.0 in its auto settings)?

Note I will be using a .5x wide angle lens, and I know focusing could be an issue - my absolute main priority is to sweep a room with as much as possible in focus, and maintain good lighting throughout (overbrightness of windows during passing excepted). Coverage must be impeccably smooth so I could not allow any side-effects to creep in through wrongly setting the exposure.

Thank you for any further help!