Go-to Guide for Source Options - Page 4

No, VMR9, depending on your video card and drivers and such, should be outputting video levels. I believe overlay will expand to PC levels. You can easily check by looking at pluge patterns and ramps on DVE, or deep ramps on Avia PRO. You should not have to use the ffdshow levels slider to achieve video levels.

At one point with old drivers I was not able to achieve video levels in VMR9, so I used ffdshow levels slider, but it still caused banding problems. I was not able to get ffdshow to successfully eliminate the banding. I would avoid ffdshow levels for this reason. You shouldn't have any problems with VMR9, and it is simple to check.

Daniel: you should not really see blacker-than-black, you should generally calibrate black to be the maximum black on your display. However, whites are a different matter. This is subjective, as we've discussed earlier on the thread. With CRT displays, you have plenty of on/off CR range to handle peak whites without any problem. Whether you include peak whites or clip them on a digital display is a user-preference, I personally would lean more towards including them.

Again, it depends on your display type. What you do for a CRT is different, right now I am assuming you are using a device with a hard-limit on on/off CR, a digital.

See posts 41 and 51 in this thread, they discuss the tradeoffs between including peak whites or clipping them on a display with a limit in on/off CR.

You can either clip down to reference white, you can include it all, or do something in between. You also have a similar choice if your particular display color-shifts instead of clips. IMO color shifting is probably more damaging and I would lean towards not seeing colorshifting, hence including everything.

With an LCD, there are two things that you may see as you raise your white level: you may see clipping, or you may see subtle colorshifting as one color "runs out." With LCD/DLP etc, and unlike CRT, there is no danger to maxing out your white level. The negative, of course, is loss in image quality due to colorshifting or clipping of white details by setting it to high. You should strive to raise your white level as high as possible on these types of displays, to *just* below the point of clipping or colorshifting. You are trying to maximize as much as possible the available on/off contrast range in the display.

Note! Do NOT do the same for CRT displays, or other phosphor displays (plasmas) as you reduce the life of the display.

If it's too bright, the correct solution is to use a neutral density filter to lower the output while maintaining the same on/off CR range. A filter will lower by the same amount the points for black and white. You certainly don't want to be watching too bright an image, this is quite fatiguing! If you lower the contrast for a pleasing image, you are lowering the white point, but you can't lower the black point at all, so you are crushing the possible on/off contrast that you could have achieved.

Say, for those reading, this is a pretty good writeup of how calibration and PC versus Video levels differences emerge in the real-world.

Remember that you can't correctly display video levels and graphics levels simultaneously. You may need a separate calibration on your display that you switch between when doing different tasks with an HTPC.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...hreadid=523614

Thanks cyberbri!

No, DVD is a SD source and should be, if encoded correctly, a 601 encode/decode. 709 applies to high-definition content, which should be encoded using the 709 matrix coefficients. If you are moving between the two, this difference in color encoding and decoding needs to be recognized. whether HD or SD material is encoded correctly, or mastered using the correct primaries (which are slightly different between SMTPE C and 709) is a different story...


As discussed, all values from 1-254 are legal values, with a nominal reference range that defines black at 16 and white at 235. the headroom and footroom is included the for reasons explained in my guide. Values can fall outside (and as you have discovered often do) the nominal reference range.

i will read your links/threads when I have a bit more free time, but in the meantime, the issue of values falling outside the nominal reference range is summarized in my writeup here, but also see the thread I linked, paying close attention to Don and Stacey's explanations.

Why would you think this is the case? I don't have any concrete info one way or the other, and there have been conflicting statements in the past about this, but it still means that if a studio is encoding a DVD in 709, it's making a serious and fundamental mastering error.

Yup. It'd be preserving even if you didn't scope the output, as long as it's being output. I am assuming we are talking VMR9, probably renderless in TT. (For others reading: the VMR9 should be preserving Studio levels by default, regular Overlay usually expands to PC levels by default. This can vary depending on software, drivers, etc etc of course.)



Set "it"? Do you mean the display? I'm confused as to what you are adjusting here. If you mean the video card settings, there isn't a way to have a reference display response really, (that I see), and also there is the danger of lowering the output and clipping BTB below 0mV. Here I am assuming you mean calibrating the display to this desktop that yo've set up above. This sounds good, but I would tend towards preserving the differentiation of peak whites even on digitals. On CRTs, there shouldn't be any problem with peak whites since a CRT won't clip. Try to avoid colorshifting the peak whites though, and this would indicate a pretty high white level setting on a CRT projector anyway...


I think I see what you're getting at. I'm not sure how precise this would be, but it would be close. I like the idea of taking screenshots of the rendered image, and looking at the RGB values in paint and getting them lined up that way. I have been extremely busy lately, so this is something on my "to experiment with" list still. I think this method of measuring the actual values of captured patterns (making sure they're captured correctly, I have to figure out the print-screen thing, because screen captures in TT for me captures regular overlay or something because it's expanded and not what I'm seeing rendered).

I think your method relies more on visual alignment, and I think it'd be pretty likely to end up a click off or more, especially if you're not looking at 100% identical patterns on your desktop and in video, because of ANSI and things like that.

You surely have more experience than I do, but this is a real-world limitation that is subjective. You can't have complete can't-see-the-screen blackout on a full-black frame (at 16) and preserve full shadow details in brighter (higher APL) scenes. LC helps with this a good deal, but you still have to make a choice when setting your black level: do you prefer complete black-out for those rare frames? Or do you prefer to retain all shadow detail in even the brightest scenes? These are extremes, and most will end up somewhere between these when deciding on a final black level *at the display*.

I wouldn't use a pattern that is brighter than half 50%, like the half-gray plus bars on Avia. A full steps/ramp pattern is very bright, and this is too bright a black level for me personally, but it will make sure you are preserving every tiny bit of detail possible, including probably stuff well below black that may be present.

My way is actually to display a full-black frame(or with just bars), and raise brightness a bit, I sort of know where my sweetspot is subjectively, so that I can clearly make out the screen, but it's still very very dark. I feel this works well in preserving a good bit of detail that a *complete* black would obscure, while still giving you a sense of totally losing the screen when moving from a normal scene to a black frame, for at least a half-second or so. Too much brighter than this and you're not gaining too much detail and you're losing that total black moment or two as your eyes adjust/wear off, and too much darker and you start losing a lot of detail in brighter scenes.


It makes sense to me, but as before as long as you can see BTB and peak whites at the display when you artificially lower white, and raise black, then you're good to go from there to start calibrating. With HTPC, VMR9 should allow this pretty easily by default. I don't want to say that VMR9=correct Studio levels, because you can still screw it up with other software, drivers, etc, ffdshow, but in general if yo're using VMR9 you should be getting Studio levels pretty much right.

If there is a change in the digital outputs when adjusting the IRE option, this is sloppy player design. I'm pretty skeptical of this being the case on the 5910.


Not sure what's going on in your setup, but no if it's output digitally, it's digital there and IRE is out o the picture. If it gets turned back into analog at some point, it's beyond the player's ability to have any control of external devices and what they are doing in conversion and voltages etc.