>>Sony KDS-XXA3000<< Settings/Tweaks thread - OWNERS ONLY! - Page 5

Originally Posted by Strawdawg

There is no need for a conversion as the set accepts the 24 fps input (if you have media that has 24 fps encoded and a source that will transmit 24 fps) and converts it to 120hz....but, I think if you turn on Cinemotion, it will assume the input signal has been converted to 30 fps and will try to remove any roughness in the data whether it is conversion artifacts, or not. It does this automatically if Cinemotion is switched ON. IF Cinemotion was truly automatic, one would not have to switch it on.

This attempt at reverse pulldown is what gives the data a smoother look. Is it correct? No, it is smoother, like many of the other signal manipulations that so many leave off. If you like it, use it...it is optional

Perhaps, you can get a more correct answer from Sony, I don't have any further to offer, either

Originally Posted by Strawdawg

I disagree

Originally Posted by hwjohn

You can check to see if the A3000 has a 24p input signal by looking at the on screen display. If it is recognized there, then it should be trivial for CineMotion to recognize it and turn itself (CineMotion) off.

If it doesn't turn itself off, then it would seem as though Sony is doing something weird in processing the signal. If that is the case, then I don't suppose there is much point in further discussion until someone gets an explanation from Sony. I can't see how you would apply a 3:2 pulldown to a 5:5 cadence (which is most likely what the A3000 uses judging from Sony's description), or why you would want to. It just doesn't make sense.

Is 300 one of the Blu-Ray discs that shows this? If it is, then I'll take a look and see if I see the same thing...

Originally Posted by hwjohn

I'll check it out with 300 when I get home today if I have time before my softball game. I'll see if my brother can bring over Underworld Evolution and check it too if I can. If you can find out a specific title that shows it really well, then I'll try to get it and check it too.

I'm not saying that you or anyone else isn't seeing a real difference, but for me I have to have someone else turn the setting on and off so that I don't know if it is on or off. Then I can watch and make a decision. A lot of times these settings that make smaller differences are hard to tell, and I end up talking myself into believing that it actually made a difference. I think it is really important when looking at these type of subjective settings that you have someone else turn the setting on and off without telling you. Now don't take that the wrong way, there may be such a huge difference that it is blatently obvious and you don't need this type of "blind" experiemnt to tell. (I'll know when I watch it for myself).

I'll give you an example from the Audio world... several years ago MacIntosh labs did an experiment to challenge all of the "critical listeners" who were claiming that speaker cable quality was extremely important. These were highly respected guys who wrote reviews, magazine articles, etc. They allowed the listeners to listen to two cables. One was "Zip cord," which is basically the same thing used in lamp power cords, about as cheap as you can get. The other was the highest end cable they could find, worth several thousand dollars.

The listeners first heard the Zip cord.... "sounds awful" they said. Then they switched to the expensive cable. All of a sudden, they started to rant and rave about the higher highs, deeper bass, better clarity... oh it was so much better.

What they didnt know was that the cables were never really switched. They were still listening to the Zip cord. The guy they saw "switching" the cables didn't really do anything... except fool their minds into thinking "here comes a change for the good."

Be really aware of that study... it applies to video just as much as audio. When you have spent 2k+ on a TV, you definetely want to believe that every setting does something great... some do, and some don't. Just take it for what it is worth and enjoy the set

Originally Posted by mastermaybe

1. I've noticed more than a few members speaking of "what" they calibrated their tv with. What is this "what"? Are we talking about equipment here, a dvd...?

2. If the above is indeed a dvd (or if a dvd that helps adjust the tv's settings exists period) is it worthwhile to pick one up? The idea of dialing in a television with 3,238 different settings to MY two eyeballs seems simultaneously suicidal AND open to a tremendous amount of error (for the rest of my viewing population, anyway).

3. This 24mhz-speak, I think I get it. Sounds like it makes sense to have it on for the majority of films I watch through BD or DVD...does this hold water?
Secondly, seems like conflicting opinions exists as to whether the TV is "smart" enough to recognize a 24p input and adjust accordingly, or if it needs to be selected manually, or by manually selecting an "auto" option, anyway)?



thanks guys,

james

Originally Posted by hwjohn

I'll check it out with 300 when I get home today if I have time before my softball game. I'll see if my brother can bring over Underworld Evolution and check it too if I can. If you can find out a specific title that shows it really well, then I'll try to get it and check it too.

I'm not saying that you or anyone else isn't seeing a real difference, but for me I have to have someone else turn the setting on and off so that I don't know if it is on or off. Then I can watch and make a decision. A lot of times these settings that make smaller differences are hard to tell, and I end up talking myself into believing that it actually made a difference. I think it is really important when looking at these type of subjective settings that you have someone else turn the setting on and off without telling you. Now don't take that the wrong way, there may be such a huge difference that it is blatently obvious and you don't need this type of "blind" experiemnt to tell. (I'll know when I watch it for myself).

I'll give you an example from the Audio world... several years ago MacIntosh labs did an experiment to challenge all of the "critical listeners" who were claiming that speaker cable quality was extremely important. These were highly respected guys who wrote reviews, magazine articles, etc. They allowed the listeners to listen to two cables. One was "Zip cord," which is basically the same thing used in lamp power cords, about as cheap as you can get. The other was the highest end cable they could find, worth several thousand dollars.

The listeners first heard the Zip cord.... "sounds awful" they said. Then they switched to the expensive cable. All of a sudden, they started to rant and rave about the higher highs, deeper bass, better clarity... oh it was so much better.

What they didnt know was that the cables were never really switched. They were still listening to the Zip cord. The guy they saw "switching" the cables didn't really do anything... except fool their minds into thinking "here comes a change for the good."

Be really aware of that study... it applies to video just as much as audio. When you have spent 2k+ on a TV, you definetely want to believe that every setting does something great... some do, and some don't. Just take it for what it is worth and enjoy the set

Originally Posted by Vetkin

I
I didn't think CineMotion should be impacting a 5:5 - 24p source, but if it was automatically toggling the setting off I shouldn't be able to see a difference. For me flipping on the CineMotion was as eye catching as a magic trick, but I'd really like to hear how it looks for you.

Originally Posted by Vetkin

I would be very interested to compare with your findings on this. I believe I was the one who brought this up a few days ago, and the first blu-ray movie I noticed it on was "300". I know the TV is getting the 24p signal because it says 1080/24p in the upper corner.

I couldn't figure out why everyone was describing it as seeming "like you're there", as it didn't look any different than normal for me at first. Once I flipped on Cinemotion however (with Motion Enhancer on high), the effect was very dramatic. The scene where young Leonidas is fighting the wolf at the beginning was shocking. When they did the close up of the wolf as he snarled at the camera, it literally looked as though he was about to jump right out of the TV.

I didn't think CineMotion should be impacting a 5:5 - 24p source, but if it was automatically toggling the setting off I shouldn't be able to see a difference. For me flipping on the CineMotion was as eye catching as a magic trick, but I'd really like to hear how it looks for you.

Originally Posted by bdrex28

Are we sure that 5:5 is in this tv?

I can't seem to find it anywhere from Sony saying as such.

Originally Posted by hwjohn

Ok, I just watched the same portion of 300 (a fight scene, chapter 14 I believe) about 20 times or more with various settings. I only used one setting at a time, so I can't speak for any interaction between the three.

CineMotion - Can't tell a difference with any setting. It appears as if it is doing the right thing and turning itself off. I watched all three settings several times over as closely as I could, and could not see any difference at all. It would be interesting to see if I can tell any difference on a standard DVD where Cinemotion should kick in... I'll try that later if I get a chance.

Motion Enhancer - Can't tell any real difference on any setting.

Motion Naturalizer - This certainly inserts black frames, and you can tell it. Auto 2 produced a horrible flicker. Auto1 was better, but still flicker. If you pause the video with either one on, it is immediately very obvious. I will say this, it does kind of give you that feeling that you are watching a film projector, but Auto2 simply over does it. Auto1 might be suitable for some people who really want that movie theater feeling. I wouldn't want to watch it in a completely dark room, but it might be to your liking with some backlighting.

The next part is read at your own risk and may be COMPLETELY wrong

As for all this 3:2 pulldown mess that has everyone confused... it is a very complicated topic because there are more acceptable framerate/resolution/scanning modes than you realize. Whether or not a reverse pulldown is needed or applied, and what cadence it is, is highly dependent on the source. Take a look at this link for the acceptable ATSC standards:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_Standards

All of the 576 line resolutions are PAL, but the rest are acceptable NTSC/HDTV for the US. You can see how it can become confusing and how complicated the algorithms must be to accurately detect and deal with all of the possibilities.

As for SD DVD's, most of them are soft telecined. We have to realize that there is a difference betwen a 3:2 pulldown and interlacing. To get the 3:2 cadence needed to convert 24 fps (film) to 30 fps for NTSC display, we take all the frames and interlace them to create two fields for each frame, with one field containing even scan lines and the other containing odd. If we take two successive frames, A and B, then we start with this on film.

AB

Now let a and b denote the fields for A and B, and E and O denote Even and Odd. After interlacing, we get this:

aEven aOdd bEven bOdd

That is good and well, but it does not fit the 3:2 pattern we need for the math to work correctly. We must do a 3:2 pulldown and repeat a field:

aEven aOdd aOdd bEven bOdd

Now you can immediately see some problems. The last aOdd created from the pulldown will be displayed with bEven as one frame, which gives us interlacing artifacts. This is what we had to live with when all displays were interlaced, 30 fps displays (fps = frames per sec, NOT fields per sec).

Now, since MPEG2 compressors are so smart, they realize that the second aOdd frame is just a repeated frame, and does not need to be included in the video stream (this saves space). Instead, the DVD is encoded with a flag that tells the player to perform the pulldown. All the player does is repeat the aOdd frame when it needs to. So, the information is actually stored on the disc as:

aEven aOdd bEven bOdd

Which is 24 fps, but Interlaced. Now for film, we can undo the interlacing to an extent, which is where we get Progressive Scan DVD players. They attempt to undo the interlacing for display on a progressive TV, a.k.a almost any HDTV. This is great, but we still must apply the pulldown to get the frame rate right. The interlacing artifacts may be gone (for the most part, it gets complicated), but the judder from the 3:2 pulldown is not.

Now... the holy grail is for a DVD player to recognize the above format and say "hey, what if I just put the fields back together to get the original 24 fps progressive material, just like it was on the film, and display that?" It is now possible for this to happen because sets like the A3000 can actually display the 24 fps if the DVD player puts it back together for us. Then we take the aEven and aOdd fields, put them back together (remember they are from the same original film frame) to get, guess what:

A B

... and the circle of confusion is complete. Currently the only DVD player I know of that will do this is not a DVD player at all, but the new Toshiba A4 HD DVD player. The PS3 is certainly capabable of doing it with a software upgrade.

Now you see why CineMotion is not needed and should turn itself off for 24p input. CineMotion's job is some mixture of attempting to reverse the 3:2 pulldown / deinterlace, but I don't know exactly what it tries to accomplish. It could be trying to get back to the A B scenario above for TV's that have 24p display capabilities. For those that don't, the best it can do is deinterlace and maybe do some type of frame interpolation to smooth out the judder introduced from the 3:2.

Keep in mind that this info only pertains to film material put on DVD. There is a lot of other material that you will find on DVD that is interlaced differently, such as "video" from a camcorder type device. That material is a whole different ballgame entirely.

Originally Posted by hwjohn

joefx,
Thanks for the comment. In general, any good DVD player will probably perform the reverse pulldown better than the TV.

You question about the reverse pulldown is a bit complicated, mainly because that term is used loosely. A true reverse pulldown "undoes" the entire operation to give you a 24p signal. A DVD player like the PS3, Oppo, or the A3000 for that matter, can't do a real reverse pulldown as I have it defined above.

The reverse pulldown that is mentioned in the Sony documentation is probably as follows:

Take the frames on the disc, already discussed as:

aEven aOdd bEven bOdd

and put them back together into progressive frames:

A B

which, as already discussed is easy enough. The problem is that we are now back to the original material, which is 24 fps progressive (24p). Until recently, no TV could display a 24p signal, so we still needed the 3:2 cadence. We got it by doing the same thing as a 3:2 telecine pulldown, but with the progressive frames we just re-created above:

AAA BB

And there you have your 3:2 cadence again. It is better because the frames are progressive and we get rid of interlacing artifacts, but we still have the 3:2 judder from the fact that frame A is displayed one extra time.

Now, there are a lot of things you could do theoretically, such as try to blend a frame together to get something like this:

AA ab BB

Where ab represents some interpolation of the real frames A and B. Who knows exactly what CineMotion does, as it could do something like this. I would image that information would be proprietary, and that several manufacturers have their own special flavors to try and make the judder better.

You are absolutely correct in your statement about CineMotion turning itself off. Now you see why there is absolutely no reason for it to turn itself on. In the case of 1080p/24p, it is obvious the TV recognizes the 24p signal so it is trivial for CineMotion to turn itself off. CineMotions job becomes much more difficult when it gets material that is shot partially with film and partially with video, or when material that is incorrectly computer edited forces the cadence out of order.

You also see why it makes most sense for the A3000 to simply display each frame 5 times to go from 24p to its native 120 Hz refresh. Doing a pulldown to go from 24 fps to 30 fps, and then displaying each frame 4 times, would be a lot more work and a lot less accurate. It is also a giveaway that 5:5 is used by the documentation, where they state that no processing is done. If you don't use 5:5, then you HAVE to use some type of processing such as pulldown to take 24 fps to some other divisor of 120 Hz.

Hope this has helped. I'll try to check some other Blu-Rays as well as standard def and give more feedback.

HWJohn...you said cinemotion appeared to turn itself off. Does the setting show that it is off when you input the 24 fps from 300, or did it show that it was on, but, appeared to be doing nothing? (assuming it was set to On before you turned on the Bluray input)

but this is only for SD content correct? if it sees 1080p footage form a blu ray disc it will do nothing i guess? i was told my Sony tech support that it doesnt effect HD content

Originally Posted by hwjohn

You can change the setting in the menu while the disc is playing... it does not gray out to deny you access. It basically turns itself off automatically without giving you notification when it sees that the signal does not require it. Again, I could see no difference at all with it on vs. off. If anyone else cares to take a look, that would be great.



Well, I haven't studied how Blu-Ray is stored and investigated all the possibilities, so I cant give you a sure fire answer. There are definitely cases where the TV or Blu-Ray player HAS to do something. For instance, I believe most BD material is stored in 24p format, but most TV's don't accept 24p or any multiple of 24p (A3000 is an exception). In that case, the BD player or TV must do something to get the frame rate into something that the TV can display.

As for interlaced HD content, just look at a 1080i signal. The A3000 is 1080p native, so it MUST deinterlace 1080i signals. How it does it I don't know, because I don't know exactly how a 1080i signal is delivered. We could probably deduce it from the ATSC standards if we really wanted to.

What the Sony rep told you may be true in that CineMotion may deal only with SD content, but you better believe there is another algorithm that may not have some fancy marketing name that handles HD content deinterlacing and pulldowns.

The great thing about BD with the A3000 is that you bypass all this crap and display the video in as close to film format you can get. You get a 1080p24 signal straight from the disc to the TV, which is native for the TV, and is exactly how it was recorded. It doesn't get much better than that. So the short answer to your question is "Yes, if the TV sees a 1080p24 signal it does nothing (except display each frame 5 times to reach 120 Hz refresh).

i think de interlacing is a process done through the DRC chip.

what are your takes on the motion naturalizer. this is i believe the black frame insertion process which is suppossed to hlep 24fpssignals by makign them look more "movie like" yet everyone seems to say it adds very obviose and annoying flicker to the picture ( which sony even states it migth do and to turn it off if it does) what do you think sony intened on people using this settign for if even they kno wit grates flicker for 24fps soutrces?

Any recommendations on reducing/eliminating SSE? I have found that it is one of those things that once you notice it you have a hard time not noticing it all the time. I am still within the 30 days of purchase so I might consider taking my 60A3000 back. I know LCD and plasma have their own different technical drawbacks but they might not be as noticeable for me (although the higher $$ is noticeable too).

I assume that other RPTV types have the same problem? Does Sony's rear projection technology differ in this regard from DLP? Would the more expensive Sony RPTV's still have SSE?

I ask this in this 'tweak' forum first to not start a big thread in the 'owners' forum where very little owner discussion seems to happen.

Originally Posted by hwjohn

I think what Sony intended with the Naturalizer is to emulate a move theater projector. I think that it does that to a certain degree, but it can definetely over do it. Next time you are in a theater, pay close attention to the screen. It flickers a small amount because of the nature of 24p film projectors. The time it takes for one frame to move to the next is slow enough at 24p for your eye to detect it.

Now, why does it bother people on their TV set but not in the theater? In my opinion, it all has to do with the environment and what we are already used to. Your brain is the most powerful postprocessor ever created, and when it get used to something, it almost expects it to stay that way. You aren't used to seeing that flicker on a TV, but you are in a theater. Also, the lighting and the environment are usually different in a theater vs. your home.

.

believe most modern projectors (at the movies) have a dual shutter that projects each frame twice. This reduces the perceived flickering that we see today.

If you are old enuf, you may recall that the flicker was more perceptible. That is where "going to the flick" originated.

I agree that the different environment play a big role in our perceptions. Modern TV is much smoother in appearance than the cinema experience.

When I go to the movies, and sit up close, the first thing I notice is the roughness (flicker, I guess), then by the time the feature begins, I have ceased to notice it.

Ok I dunno what sse is? On my tv I am noticing like severe digital blocking mainly on the text when I am watching hi def cable. Is this SSE? If so any suggestions to reduce it? When I watch blu rays everything is perfect but 1080i cable looks great except for that. I have it calibrated for color brightness and it is on vivid which I know people on the forum hate but for me the picture looks so much clearer and colorful. Help anyone?

Heres what I got
Vivid
Pic 84
Brightness 55
color 60
Sharp 15
mpeg Off
Noise Off
Drc High Density (only suppose to affect 480i, according to the maual)

Originally Posted by hwjohn

I agree with you, which is why I think that the Naturalizer over does it a bit. It is more like watching an old film projector than a modern one. You still notice flicker today, but that is just and issue with 24p. Human eyes can pretty readily distinguish 24p flicker, which is why directors must be very careful with pans, lens selection, film, etc. It is unbelievable the trouble they will go through to get a shot right. I remember reading about a shot in the new version of Texas Chainsaw Massacre where Jessica Biel is running. The actually made a track the entire length of her run and allow the camera to ride down the track as she ran!



SSE stands for Silk Screen Effect, and is a shimmering produced by the screen material, typically on bright white areas of the picture. What you are seeing is not SSE.

What you are seeing is most likely a combination of two things:

1) MPEG2 or MPEG4 compression artifacts in your signal. You might as well get used to this as there isn't much you can do about it. Cable/Sat companies can often times compress the signal too much in order to save bandwidth, and you get macroblocking issues on some channels as you are seeing. You can try turning MPEG noise reduction on, it can help a little, but it won't make it go away completely.

2) Improper calibration can introduce a lot of "mosquito" noise into the picture. If black level and white level are not set correctly, then the TV has to start making ambiguous decisions about what is black and what is grey. This is most noticeable (for me) in dark scenes. You will see a lot of noise in dark areas where the TV is trying to discern between what should be black and what should be grey. You have effectively compressed the range of black to white.

It takes a while to get used to a calibrated set because most people have viewed a "Vivid" type picture all their life. Calibrate it and force yourself to watch it for a week.