AVS HD 709 - Blu-ray & MP4 Calibration - Page 105

I've been using the I guess pretty original version of this disk for almost four years, just downloaded the latest version in anticipation of getting an 8350, and wow, this is much more complete than it used to be.

Thank you to all the contributors, the best disk has become even better!

Can I ask what may be an obvious question to many of the experts here?

After spending countless hours reading the differences between RGB, YCbCr, 16-235 & 0-255...

If I have a new LED TV, a PS3 for Games & Bluray Playback, and an XBOX360 for Games, NetFlix, & MediaCenter HDTV Playback...

If I want to set my tv so that I can have one input, one display setting mode (on the TV) w/o screwing up my blacks & whites, I should set the PS3 & XBOX360 to force RGB & Full/Expanded everywhere, then set the TV's HDMI Level to "Normal", then simply tweak the brightness & contrast using the 1-Basic Levels MP4 (ie, the Brightness 0-255 calibration video)?

It seems to me this will provide the most accurate display across all source types w/o having to constantly switch modes.

Is this correct?

Thanks!

Ok, so I REALLY tried following this thread to figure out and perhaps I am close.

I want/need to check some of the test patterns against my to be newly installed 6010.

But I don't have a Blue Ray Burner, nor do I know anyone that does. However I can burn to DVD and I do have a PS3 (FAT)

Will that allow me to "use" this disc ? Then confused to WHAT I am burning to the DVD to play in the PS3?

Thanks in advance!

Yes, get the AVCHD version. Burn to DVD, and play on PS3. I have a slim PS3 and it played well. Your fat version should work too.

Sorry I haven't responded to this question sooner. I have actually been working on the answer.

So, with my Samsung plasma, and standing close to the screen so that individual pixels can be seen, the sharpness setting I arrive at, and the point as sharpness is decreased where vertical and horizontal black lines have no zone of lighter pixels, is ~10.

From my normal viewing position, which is ~10 feet away, the setting is ~ 20-25.

I get these same results with the AVS disc and the S&M disc. When viewing programming, especially football games, the sharpness setting of 10, as I have already posted, is significantly blurred compared to the setting of 20. Higher settings up to around 40 look even sharper, but there is something about them that's "too sharp" and the white halo in the test patterns is easily visible from my normal viewing position.


I don't have the DVE disc to see what the recommendations you are referring to are. The S&M instructions do not specify what viewing distance to do the sharpness adjustment from, and neither does your manual as of August 13, 2011. If the DVE disc specifies, then I apologize for not knowing, but I can say that there is a significant difference in the setting on my plasma depending on how close I am to the TV when looking for the lighter halos.

There's no discussion there. Just trolls and nonsense. Although I'm surprised to find myself in agreement with Doug but not suprised to disagree with Michael.

Now that I have calibrated my PJ with PS3 (thread here), I need to do the same with my HTPC. Is it advisable to do a separate calibration for the HTPC with the PJ, or should I use GPU for tweaking the picture? ATI's control panel has some settings, although I haven't tried how useful they are.

I read through the patterns info pdf but the meter aiming patterns are not covered.

Anyone know how those patterns are used?

I assume you just put them up and take readings and try to determine if the meter is aimed correctly but ... I'm not sure how that would really work.

Thank You.

I couldn't get 0-16 or anything above 235 to show up from my HTPC, no matter how I set my ATI GPU's control panel. So I'm guessing they are not sent at all or clipped by my Onkyo 705. How do I fix that?

BTB and WTW show up correctly with PS3.

The PS3 is going through the Onkyo, and I get video levels with BTB/WTW.

After reading up on this it looks like my old ATI X1950 doesn't have video levels output in Catalyst software, it's locked or not at all available on it. So I have to live with possibly crushed blacks and whites.

I tried the Levels Wizard, but it did nothing.

edit: did calibration over the weekend with my PC from scratch after I finished with PS3. I somehow managed to mess up my first calibration run with bad clipping in the highlights. On second run I got almost as good results with the PC as with PS3, although I had to go from 16-252, and gamma dropped (too bright) steeply after 70 IRE.

edit2: I re-calibrated with 16-235, and as expected whites are now brighter, there's no clipping of colors according to the color gradients, and the calibration required less tweaking. Calibrating to 16-235 instead of 16-25x should also improve contrast. I'm going to keep using this calibration instead of the 16-252.

im sorry to ask this so far into the thread, but i got the disc to load and i dont know how to calibrate correctly as in im not sure if im going through the process accurately. i have the patterns/user guide pdf, but i'm still confused with all the options, idk where to begin, where to go, and where to end....

would someone be so kind and patient as to briefly explain how you used it (order, which windows, patterns, etc....).

im using the second version (AVCHD burned to a dvd) on my panasonic 210..

thank you

It's confusing, and it takes quite a bit of reading to wrap one's head around what's needed. Just be patient, read through a guide or two once or twice, and take your time. Curt Palme's unfortunately named guide is the best one I've seen, although I've read through the guide here several times.

Brief sequence of how I do it: first you need to figure out what are the proper settings for your TV or projector, BD player or video source, and AV amp if you use one. You should google that or ask in the appropriate forum as it's beyond this brief guide.

Pop the disc in, and use the 1st and 3rd patterns at "Initial Setup" (I think it's called, upper left corner of the main menu) to set your black and white points with Brightness and Contrast sliders. Set your black so that reference black marked on the screen is truly black, ie. 0-16 is indistuingashable from the background. Set white so that 235-255 is indistuingashable from the background, or so that only 255 is, but 245-254 are levels of grey. I use the former method for improved contrast at the expense of theoretically clipping some colors. I believe that's pretty much all you can do if you don't have a calibration puck.

If you do have one, then use 80% (aka IRE) and 30% grey windows from any "windows" menu to set both of them to grey using Brightness and Contrast settings in RGB controls for each of the three main colors. Use grey figures as reported by ColorHCFR or a commercial calibration software.

After that I set Saturation level by writing down the Y-value of 100% (aka IRE) white window as reported by ColorHCFR, and tweaking Saturation control until 100% red window's Y is 21% of that value.

Then I run greyscale test with 10% increments to confirm my grey levels are neutral, and see how my gamma is. If I need to tweak gamma, I do so using this guide. It's for Epson projectors, but it should be easily adaptable to any PJ or TV.

An (advanced) step is using the same guide to set up color saturation. Don't underestimate the impact of this step (color saturation), as that can have a big impact, and the approach in the linked guide is much better than usually used (which is to set saturation with 100% colors instead of 75%).

Finally I re-run greyscale test and saturation tests at 0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% for each of the main and secondary colors to see if there's anything I need to tweak further.

It will take probably 10+ hours of reading, calibrating and tweaking to get to a final pleasing result. I can now do a full calibration in 60-90 minutes, but that's after investing tens of hours to reading the guides, poring through forums, and asking questions here. So it's quite an investment in time. And the software and especially the puck is not cheap if you don't have one. But I guarantee you will be very pleased with the results.

Just want to say thanks for this superb disc/files for free. Really great that you guys have done this and made folders for chromapure/calman/HCFR.

Hat off to you!

(my plasma picture is now good enough to eat) .....*licks it*

well thanks jouko342 n reality, i tried and the calibration didnt work...or i should say the way i did it made it look a lot worse than outta the box. so i rreset defaults, took some ideas from the calibration and now i kinda like pq, but ill keep tryin

OK new calibration question...

So my new Onkyo 809 has this ISF Calibration setup...where on the AVR itself you can adjust nearly everything like contrast, brightness, saturation, red, green, etc.

Then it has similar modes like my projector ISF Day, ISF Night, Cinema then it has "Direct" that does NOTHING.

So help me understand IF I should be using any of this and then how. I guess the IDEA is that based on the INPUT signal I could adjust my "projector" or TV etc ?

If that is the case...do I first calibrate the RAW device, i.e. projector and THEN I go in make additional changes based on the input ? Does the AVR changes ACTUALLY really change things or does it just PROCESS changes, thus destroying the picture quality ?

Or is this really a gimmick and I should avoid it ?

If you all have more questions, I will do my best to clarify.
Thanks in advance!

Just an update to my blu-ray player the Philips BDP3020/F7, the newest firmware 1.026 seems to have killed the ability of it to read any of the burned AVS HD 709 calibration discs. I tried the HDMV and the AVCHD both burned to DVD media and they will not play. I verified the discs are good as I played them and calibrated some TV's for family using different LG blu-ray players.

If I could roll back the firmware I would, but alas I don't know if simply flashing the player to an older firmware will work fine.

For reference, the previous version that worked which I was using was v1.019 and the new version that broke compatability is 1.026

In a pinch if the player is capable of playing video from USB, put the mp4 version on a thumb drive and see how it works. I like using this since it is faster to navigate than than the DVD on my Samsung. However this version is missing some of the patterns ..
Good luck!

For setting brightness aka black level one method that I found that seemed to help me visually better tell when there was no pixel activity not even the slightest on the 16 stripe black pattern is to use the Color HCFR Near Black Window patterns on the AVS 709 disk. If black level is still too high after setting it initially with the black clipping pattern, turn the brightness control down to the point where the Color HCFR Near Black Pattern 0 IRE black has no pixles firing i mean none at all then go back and verify that 17 on the black clipping pattern is barely visible and you have the right brightness setting. I do not want to mislead people if this is a method that doesn't help in setting the black level easier or correctly. I just thought it might help. I have a pn51d6500 and my brightness ended up at 57 no pixel activity on the Color HCFR near black pattern 0 IRE but 17 barely visible on the Black Clipping pattern. If anyone can explain this more clearly, then please go right ahead, i don't want to confuse anyone.

Thanks for the suggestion, but my player doesn't have USB, only an SD slot for BD Live 2.0 content and it doesn't play mp4/avc encoded files so that's out unfortunately.

I tried to revert the firmware but the player refuses to downgrade/update to an older firmware so I guess I'm stuck for now. I contacted their support but I'm not holding my breath in that regards.

My only option at the moment is to either pick up another blu-ray player or a BD-ROM. Looking at a newer Sony BDP-S185 player but it's not on the list so not sure if the safest route would be just to get a BD-ROM drive.

Ok thanks much!

The patterns are awesome!!!