"High Definition Benchmark" BD Edition by Stacey Spears and Don Munsil - Page 2

Alan just told me they do ship overseas.

Region coding wouldn't be a problem for me though as i use an American Playstation 3 for Blu Ray playback.

Good thing my digital has a blue only mode!!

My DLP offers B&W, Red, Green and Blue only modes.

The montage is available with all three high quality audio options: PCM, TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. I disabled dialnorm, on TrueHD, so there is no volume difference between them. I figured this would be a great chance for everyone to compare the three on equal footing.

We put the montage on the disc three times, once for each audio instead of once with three audio tracks. We wanted the highest bitrate possible for video. The highest peaks occur during cross-fades. It goes really high. This prohibited us from using 96 kHz audio. 96 kHz has a bitrate of 13 Mbps. That combined with 40 Mbps video pushes us above the 50 Mbps maximum.

Feature Suggestion:

Are there any animated/non static test patterns such as greyscale or black level that could be used to test gamma correction in real time? And maybe some low apl and high ansi contrast footage for real world performance of gamma settings? It seems like gamma calibration is becoming more popular and this would be very helpful to a lot of us.

Anyway, everything is sounding really good so far. Thanks for all your hard work!

Did you guys shoot the 4k content? I seem to recall that you were messing with the red camera for a while?

Is this disc going to remain exclusive to Oppo and AVS (for purchasing)? Will it eventually be at B&M's and Amazon?

Yes, I own a RED ONE. The montage is early stuff and lot of it is learning.

Long term, that is our goal. Once some of the reviews get published and more people start commenting on the disc, we hope to expand.

The disc has two patterns that will give you a hint on your gamma. The image cropping pattern contains a single pixel on/off checkerboard in the middle that is made of 16 and 235. If the checkerboard blends into the background, from your seating position, the gamma is 2.5. The pattern only works if your viewing the pattern 1:1 and your display can resolve single pixel. At the moment DLP appears to be the only technology that can display single pixel on/off without distortions.

The PLUGE patterns have a checkerboard in the background as well. Its not single pixel like the image croppping. The values alternate between 16 and 17. With a gamma of 2.4-2.5, you can barely make out this checkerboard from your viewing position.

There are a lot of people who love to see as much shadow detail as possible. Some of that detail was never meant to be seen.

Its easy to measure gamma with measuring equipment. What you are asking for soundes like something you can do visually. To solve this problem, we need to design something that works across multiple display technologies. It is on our to do list.

This sounds great. Is there an A/V sync test?

-R

Not directly. The montage has a section with fast cuts that are timed exactly with audible cues. I spent a lot of time ensuring sync. This is good for 24p lip sync.

We actually designed a pretty cool lipsync pattern a while ago. Along with a synthetic pattern you also need a live sequenc with someone speaking. Because different amounts of processing alter lipsync, multiple patterns need to be built. You need 24p, 60i as well as different resolutions. The DVDO products actually adjust their amount of auto delay based on the processing being done.

When I was working on the WHQL 3.0 DVD test annex, we researched this subject. At the time no one would had a full proof way to verify. On the disc side you have to worry about muxing the audio and video streams and ensure this is aligned correctly. How do you verify? Is there a known perfect player?

A full suite of A/V sync patterns is on our to do list. I should mention its a long list.

Here's my A/V sync validation technique. It's pretty tedious, but I believe it to be accurate.

First, demux the stream. For this example, I've used the A/V sync test stream on my test pattern site:

http://www.w6rz.net/avsync.ts



Record the starting PTS for the audio and video streams and take the difference. In this case, the difference is -465 ticks or -5.16666 milliseconds.

Then find an A/V sync point in both the video and audio elementary streams. For video, I use mpeg2decode outputting to .tga files.



The sync point is on frame 32 (mpeg2decode starts with frame 0). The video bitstream is 720p@59.94, so the sync point is at 1.001/60 * 31 = 517.18333 milliseconds.

For audio, I use Goldwave.



and then zoom in on the A/V sync point.



Looks like the tone starts at 522.4 milliseconds. But the audio starts 5.16666 milliseconds before the video, so the actual sync is 522.4 - 5.1666 = 517.3333 milliseconds. The A/V sync offset is then 517.3333 - 517.18333 = 0.15 milliseconds (which is pretty close).

Ron

I recently ordered your test disc via Amazon, the actual vendor is Oppo. The order was placed before I saw the AVS post. Congratulations to you and Don on producing and bringing to market a product. If folks only knew what a task that can be!!

OT, AVS shows my membership date as Sep 1999. Mine actually proceeded this quite some time. There was a problem in the late 90's and some members had to sign up again. Alan or David may remember the occurrence.

You guys are my heroes.

Thanks for all the hard work, I'll put my copy to good use in the future. Can't wait to have it on hand.

Is there any 50i SD and HD material to test 2:2?

There is definitely 2-2 content, though it's 60i.

Don

Don or Stacey,

Since I'm too lazy to compare between the two, can you tell what your disc offers over DVE: HD Basics in terms of video patterns/demos?

I will buy this for the montage. The screenshot posted by sspears sold me.

The discs are in many ways complementary. They both contain the core basic patterns for adjusting all the standard settings like brightness, contrast, and sharpness. DVE contains some extra technical calibration patterns and audio test tones.

Our disc has a complete suite of deinterlacing evaluation patterns, which DVE doesn't cover. And our disc has a some unique patterns like our chroma alignment pattern, which we think is the first chroma alignment (Y/C delay) pattern that really works. Many of the patterns we have in common we think we've added some extra value to, like putting a 16/17 checkerboard in the background of the PLUGE pattern, which among other things makes it easy to set black level on single-chip DLPs. Or the fact that we wrote our own pattern software so we could create patterns in native 4:2:0 YCbCr. This allowed us to make the cleanest possible chroma patterns, for example.

If you're doing very technical calibration work, you probably need DVE. Our disc is still valuable even if you have DVE, just for the deinterlacing tests and the extra patterns that DVE doesn't have.

Don

Asking the creator of one title to compare it against another is always dangerous. Don and I are biased, but I will do my best to be as unbiased as possible. If we are going to discuss DVE and S&M, we should also bring AVIA into the mix, even though they don’t have their BD on the market yet. I suspect you will see it bundled with Sony stuff. I have been friends with Joe since 1994.

AVIA and DVE include instructional videos on calibration while our disc does not. AVIA takes the live approach while DVE is animated. Both accomplish the same thing, which is explaining how to adjust the controls. I would love to produce an animated tutorial and I hope that one day we can. It’s not a cheap endeavor. The tutorial on DVE was created back when the original DVD was produced. Joe, way back when, decided to produce the original DVD at 1080p for future use. The new DVE: HD Basics includes a new intro that goes into some detail about post production. Allen Daviau even narrates some of it. This is the section where they color grade a banana and make it blue. This alone makes DVE: HD Basics worth owning in my opinion.

I always wanted to get Guy Kuo and Joe Kane to work together on a disc. I felt that Guy’s synthetic patterns with Joe’s tutorials and montage would make the perfect disc. Sadly that never happened.

Both DVE and S&M contain a montage of images. Joe’s was shot pre-2001 with a Panasonic HD camera at 720p resolution. The computer animated portions were done at full 1080p resolution. Joe considers this a torture sequence more than demonstration material. He has a commentary track on DVE: HD Basics that explains the purpose of the scenes. Our montage was meant more as demonstration material.

Our montage was shot last year from August through September using the RED ONE camera. We shot everything at 4k with a 2:1 aspect ratio. For us, it was a learning experience. We used our own algorithms to convert the 4k down to 1080p. We used the same algorithms to create the 720p version of the Joe’s Montage, on DVE, including our dither.

DVE has some test patterns in 720p and some in 1080p. I don’t believe all exist in both resolutions. Our patterns are all 1080p with a title that includes some at 480p.

I believe our test patterns represent the state-of-the-art at the present time. We believe our chroma alignment pattern is the first real useful pattern for evaluating YC delay both horizontally and vertically. At anytime, you can use the up arrow on the remote to display on-screen help for the pattern you are viewing. You can use the menu to navigate patterns or the left and right arrows. You can force our patterns to loop until you chose to move on or have them return to the menu after one minute.

DVE has a lot more synthetic patterns than we do. You can blame Don for this. Don strongly believes that we should not put patterns on a disc just for perceived value. He wants every pattern to serve a purpose and for us to be able to explain how to use it. This disc focuses mainly on patterns an end user can use without special instrumentation. We have a lot more patterns up our sleeve, but they do require special test instruments to use properly, which is geared more towards the CE companies and reviewers.

Our disc has an entire section on film and video deinterlacing in HD and SD. In fact, ours is the first disc to have non-synthetic patterns to check for inverse telecine. The HQV disc offered one synthetic pattern.

I believe DVE is localized in other languages while ours is only in English.

I personally own all flavors of AVIA and DVE.

Ok, I just ordered, but I have one question. On the disc, does it tell me what I should be looking for, as I perform the various tests? I see that link posted to the pdf, but printing out lots of pages will be costly (at least for me) & I always find that reading about such things rather than seeing what is correct, always leaves something lost in translation.

We're glad you asked! Because the answer is yes!

On every pattern, you can pop up a help page, including graphics showing right and wrong versions of the patterns. Just hit the up-arrow button on the remote to show or hide the help overlay.

In some cases, there are way too many variations of "wrong" for us to give an example of each, but there is always a "correct" version and an example of the most common "incorrect" view. The examples are zoomed in 2X and use somewhat constricted contrast so you can still see what the pattern should look like if your display controls are set wrong.

Don

That's good enough for me. 24fps lip sync is my main concern. Thanks for responding.

-R

As Don mentioned, we have pop-up help for virtually every clip. The montage and trailers do not have help, but all of the test patterns do. Navigating our disc is a bit different. The goal was to use the disc without repositioning your hand on the remote. Normally you have to move between arrows keys and transport controls. Not here! Once you are on a pattern, you can use the left and right arrows to go to the previous or next patterns. You can use the up and down arrows to display or hide the pop-up help. I posted this image on the first page, but I am reposting here. This example is the pop-up for the Geometry pattern. The original pattern stays in the background with the help on top.

Ron,

Thank you for posting the details on AV Sync. Its always good to know others care about the details. On a side note, is there an MPEG2 encoder that would allow me to force a fixed QP when encoding?

Ok, this is wonderful. I can't wait for my disc to get to me now!

Ok I just got my disc today & this is a wonderful tool. I have a PS3 feeding a 60" Sony A2020 SXRD Projection LCD. It was pretty dialed in as I already have the DVE HD Basic disc. However S&M allowed me to do just a little more fine tuning (IMHO)

Having said that I have one issue (that is my own). From my seated position of approx 10 feet, with my head more or less center mass of the display, I can not tell any changes whatsoever on the sharpness test. From 0 to Max I see no difference at all. I guess these soon to be 42 year old eyes, just can't resolve that kind of detail at that distance. C'est La Vie!

My real question is, on both the Dynamic range low & high tests, my display will not show a static image. Both tests flash. I presume that is not normal, correct? What does this mean, & short of professional calibration what steps can I take to alleviate this?














edit: Where is the "rate this thread" button?

First, I would adjust sharpness while you are close to the screen. Second, when you display the help for sharpness, can see the difference in the examples? Third, go through the sharpness range now and see if you see any difference, again, close to the display.

If you do not see any change, it is most likely because the sharpness control is being bypassed. Sometimes this occurs when sending in an HD resolution. It really all depends on the chips in the display.


RUN!! Just kidding. The dynamic range clips are supposed to flash. The same bars on the contrast pattern are static. I will add this to our FAQ. The flashing is to help you see the bars. When you get close to the clipping point, it is more difficult to see the bars. The flashing makes it easier. Another trick is to move the bars. We had both versions, but went with the flashing in the end. I did not like tracking left/right or up/down to see the levels.

Thanks. I will try both suggestions when I get home tonight.

FWIW - For those using a database for their media the UPC (bar code) for the S&M test disc is 898072002011