***Official Digital Video Essentials Discussion Thread*** (1 Viewer)

[Dan Hitchman]

Hmmm... sounds to this lay person as though there needs to be some fine tuning of DVE before it's really ready for prime time.

Can someone tell me if any of the DTS calibration tracks are encoded in DTS-ES Discrete 6.1?

I'm not about to buy this disc until Joe Kane can explain some of these illeged quirks (if they are, or if we're missing something), or states there is a problem and implements a replacement procedure.

Dan

 

[Brian L]

Edward,

RE: Your Sharpness setting....

Was that typical of what you would get with Avia? When I ran my set (Pioneer 533HD) it seemed to require a much higher setting than Avia.

Given the apparent difference, it begs the question "Which is correct?".

BGL

 

[David Judah]

I had to boost my color and drop my sharpness compared to Avia(Mits 55908).

DJ

 

[Daryl L]

edited

 

[Edward J M]

Was that typical of what you would get with Avia? When I ran my set (Pioneer 533HD) it seemed to require a much higher setting than Avia.

I'll have to check.....I screwed around with all the settings so much I forgot where it was set with Avia. I find sharpness to be somewhat subjective - a "how much is too much" type setting when it comes to inducing extra noise around the pattern lines, etc. I went back and forth many times before I settled on 65%.

Other things I messed around with were:

1) Blackness Level Enhancer - I set this to off on my set. It seems to be a Band-Aid function for those people who set the brightness and contrast levels so high the blacks wash out.

2) Velocity Modulation - I set this to off on my set. It enhances the edges around images (generally a bad thing IMO), and definitely increased the thickness of the black line vs. the white line on the DVE test pattern when they are supposed to be the same thickness.

3) Color Temperature - I set the color mode to "DVD-Movies" (this is the most accurate color mode, as opposed to "News" or "Sports", etc.). I then experimented between Cool, Warm, and Standard. As DVE advised, Warm seemed to provide the most natural looking Gray color on the test pattern, so I went with it.

Ed

 

[Chris Will]

I received another message from Joe Kane Prod. There is some good news, from a certain point of view.

29 September

Chris,

We have determined that there appears to be a problem with the level in the LFE track. It's 5 dB above what's on VE and some of our other test discs when played back on my system. We've checked the DVE master tape and the level on the authoring platform and they are correct, all of which are Dolby Digital encoded, the same signals that goes down on the disc. We are now doing test pressings to see where the level shift might have taken place.

For the time being, when using the current version of DVE, set the LFE at +80 dB. I'll send you another note when we know why it appears to be wrong on the disc but right in the master for the disc. We don't know how it is happening since it is Dolby encoded in all three places. We don't know what could be altering the LFE in an encoded bit stream and not altering everything else.

Joe Kane

So, there you have it. Set your LFE to 80dB for know. That is exactly where I left my setting. I'll keep everyone posted if I hear from JKP again.

 

[GregBe]

Chris,

Thanks for the legwork on this one. I guess from the email I will set my sub at 80. I do it though without total confidence in its accuracy (which is the reason I purchased this disc.) Please keep us posted if you hear anything else.

Greg

 

[Brian L]

Chris,

If you get any additional comment from Joe, you might ask why the main channels of DVE seem to be down a few dB from the tones on VE.

I think I noted that I was down about 3 dB after running VE, then without changing anything, running DVE.

BGL

 

[Kent Wo]

Do you need to be able to access your Tv's service menu for this disk to be effective? Or are the on screen menu's enough? I've never used a calibration disk, and was expecting it to be pretty much all tests to set up your Tv, but in the 1/2 hour I've watched was pretty much just explaining about the DVD and TV etc...

If I do need to use the serivce menu, is there some place I can go to learn how to access it?

 

[AndyWT]

The shapness pattern on both Avia and Digital Video Essensials are correct. Both should be sharp but no ringing on a perfect setup. The difference is that Avia's sharpness pattern has detail upto the maximum of dvd's capability, and the pattern on Digital Video Essensials is filtered slightly so the pattern is more typical of the amount of detail in real dvds. The sharpness control on your TV/dvd player may have more of an effect with Avia or DVE depending on what frequency of detail the sharpness control is adjusting.

 

[Alex Bischoff]

And another thing -- I am confused by something discussed in the advanced video section where they talk about the warm and cool colors of grey. I have a standard def Wega set, so I am able to change my color temperature between cool, warm, and neutral.

Todd: I also have a standard def WEGA (27fs12) and I believe the correct (that is, unaltered) setting is "neutral".

 

[Todd K]

Todd: I also have a standard def WEGA (27fs12) and I believe the correct (that is, unaltered) setting is "neutral".

I'll buy that. I think my model is the kv32fs13 (purchased October 2001). I had already decided to keep it on the neutral setting. The whites and blacks just looked too red on the warm setting, particularly when compared to the black bars created by the TV's 16:9 mode. And I think it's confirmed by DVE as well, though that section was a little confusing.

 

[Randy Tennison]

I am glad I'm not going crazy. I got the disc this weekend, and I set up the speakers, and had the same problem with the sub level. It blew the meter away. When I set it to 75db, it was barely audible.

I'll try the 80db, and see what happens. However, I'm not confident in the disc right now.

 

[Ike]

Okay, got DVE today. I have a Panasonic PT-53WX53 (maybe the PT-52WX or something, but my manual covers all of them, so I'm going to assume they are close enough that it shouldn't matter.)

My problem was with background "grain." In some shots, especially interior shots, I'd get what a poster on here called "dot crawl." It wasn't film grain, I don't believe but something else. I thought it might be my DVD player, but then I got a high defintion signal, and it suffered from the same problem.

So, I got the disc, and ran through the basic calibration. Nothing really changed drastically except for my Colour and Tint. They were boosted a few points up. After running through the calibration, I switched to HBO HD, which was showing Ocean's Eleven. Since it's a new movie, the transfer should be relatively good. However, if anything, it looked worse than before. It looked like the contrast was set too high, and the background crawl was worse than before.

Is this something I'm going to have to go to a service menu to fix? Will someone like myself who is relatively inexperienced be able to navigate the service menu without screwing something up? Could it be that both my DVD player and HBO HD just don't look all that good? TV doesn't really appear excessively grainy, nor do videogames. I chalked that up to the lack of a high quality image to bring out the flaws.

After playing with DVE for only a brief period of time, one of the things I didn't like was the lack of documentation on a lot of the Reference Materials. I'm unfamiliar with these tests, and unfamiliar on how to use them.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Rick Ewing]

Would another workaround for this issue be to calibrate from the DTS tones instead of DD (assuming a DTS bass calibration tone exists on this disc)?

 

[sonny_b]

Is it me or is this DVD so freakin hard to jump around. There are listed tons of test patterns and things but where are they? They should've put an index of test patterns and tones somewhere so they would be easy to get to.

IKE:
As far as the HDTV input...you would need to re-calibrate using the HDTV input and not the DVD input if that's possible...since the values are going to be different for the different source.

-sonny

 

[Brian L]

Is it me or is this DVD so freakin hard to jump around. There are listed tons of test patterns and things but where are they? They should've put an index of test patterns and tones somewhere so they would be easy to get to.

There are some ergonomic issues, thats for sure.

You can jump straight to the video test patterns, and get to the black level and contrast test (among others), but WTF is the sharpness pattern?

Its at the end of the tutorial on sharpness, and you can't jump straight to it. You need to skip to the chapter AFTER sharpness, and then back up. Duhhhhh.

FWIW, there is even a note on the JKP web site that tells you to do that to get to the basic patterns.

Once you have gone through the basics a couple times, its not a big deal, but for something that has been a few years in the making and brand spankin' new, it could be a bit more user friendly.

BGL

 

[Chris Will]

Just thought I would keep everyone up to date. I heard from Joe Kane again:

7 October

Chris,

The level of the LFE track is still causing us trouble.

We can find a number of professional test DVD's that agree with DVE including one from Dolby and one from THX. My problem is that if those discs are right then the internal tones on my Proceed AVP are wrong as are the tones on VE. We had always assumed that VE was correct because it closely matched the internal generator of the AVP, but now that we find that DVE is matching the Dolby and THX discs we are beginning to wonder if something happened to Dolby Digital in the seven years between the two productions.

In any event I've asked Dolby to help me with answers. I know we produced the program to current standard. Dolby confirmed that our levels on the master tape are correct. They match the levels on the mastering system for the DVD. We have since done a number of test pressings using other sources of audio test tones and determined that what goes in to the DVD from the master comes out on the DVD. Nothing strange is happening in that path.

If DVE is correct, and there are two other discs that suggest it is, then where we, both Madrigal and I, going wrong in 1996?

Joe Kane

This is interesting news. Can someone compare Avia and DVE's sub tones and see if they match. I hate to think that VE had us set the sub wrong for 7 years. When I lower mine to 75dB useing DVE it just sounds too weak. If I hear from Joe Kane again I'll let everyone know.

 

[Sebastian]

Great!
So is the LFE messed up or not, Mr. Joe Kane? I mean how hard can it be to figure out if it is encoded wrong?
I thought the the orignal VE was perfect in the LFE department. From the sounds of it DVE is wrong. This weekend I am going to actaully open this DVD up and give it a run.

Thanks Chris for keeping us posted.

 

[Dan Hitchman]

Ike,

The only current calibration material designed for consumer consumption (not taking into account the HD hard drive arrays and HD test signal generators that professionals use in the field) for full HD signals is DVE on D-Theater/D-VHS tape for the two JVC decks.

You do not use NTSC DVD's to calibrate HD signals. They are entirely different animals.

There is also word that Joe Kane will be producing a high definition version of DVE for Microsoft's Corona video compression codec (featured in WM9) and putting it on a normal DVD. There will be DVD players in the near future that will have Corona decoding software built in along with standard MPEG-2. Stereophile Guide to Home Theater and Widescreen Review have had blurbs on this version and state the picture quality on this new HD DVE trounces the JVC HD tapes during the test comparisons reporters have seen (probably an indication that the D-Theater tape format and/or the tape decks themselves were not developed with enough time and care by JVC in the first place; and I'm sure some of the blame comes from artifacts caused by the outdated MPEG-2 codec).

This is being done so that there is at least one non-linear, full HD calibration disc in the consumer market to get the most out of HDTV monitors today (until Blu-Ray is ready for prime-time), not because they think that WM9 will be the choice for pre-recorded HD material. The linear aspect of an HD tape, like the D-VHS version of DVE, makes it a real bitch to navigate for calibration purposes.

I just hope the problems and the clunky user interface issues on this DVE disc can be worked out before this new HD disc is released.

Dan