Spears & Munsil 4K UHD HDR Benchmark (Test Discs) May 15, 2023

[Sledgehamma]

Any update @Stacey Spears?

[Stacey Spears]

We are running final tests before sending to Sony. We found a bug last week that was quickly fixed.

There are 8 versions of every test pattern on disc one and each group can have different bugs.

We just finished the copy, disc art and booklet, so they are now done. Once we wrap up the tests, which we hope by Friday, off they go to Sony. As soon as we send the masters to Sony, I will post an update.

[Kool-aid23]

Very exciting and early congratulations on your achievement. I'm curious, previously you mentioned that you were disappointed on how Dolby Vision was on disc. Are you still disappointed or has the industry listen to you and others and started to adjust?

Regards,

[FilmFreakosaurus]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

We are running final tests before sending to Sony. We found a bug last week that was quickly fixed.

There are 8 versions of every test pattern on disc one and each group can have different bugs.

We just finished the copy, disc art and booklet, so they are now done. Once we wrap up the tests, which we hope by Friday, off they go to Sony. As soon as we send the masters to Sony, I will post an update.

It's a Festivus miracle!

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by Kool-aid23

Very exciting and early congratulations on your achievement. I'm curious, previously you mentioned that you were disappointed on how Dolby Vision was on disc. Are you still disappointed or has the industry listen to you and others and started to adjust?

Regards,

No changes have been made to Dolby Vision on Blu-ray. Blu-ray uses V2.9 while the streaming services are on v4.0.

We found three bugs last week. One on the HDR disc, which has been fixed. One on the SDR disc and due to how buggy Scenarist is, we need to create a second project to fix the bug. We have ~8 projects for the HDR disc. Normally it is one project per disc. And we found an artifact in the Graded vs. Ungraded montage and I am trying to fix. Re-encoding did not fix it, so trying different encoder settings.

Update: The re-encode with setting changes fixed the compression artifact. Hopefully once the SDR disc bug is fixed, we are good to go. Actually it also needed updated credits to match the other two discs and David was going to check all the menu navigation to make sure it matched the HDR disc. This one thing was a lot of work. e.g. Pressing up arrow from top row items to ensure they go to the proper tab or the bottom row, pressing down to go to proper tabs. Or pressing right arrow from radio buttons to go to proper tabs.

I don't have a total file count, but the first HDR disc has over 5,000 encoded files on it. The format supports 9999, so we are only halfway there, but it does not appear anyone has ever tried to put that many files on a UHD BD disc before. The current HDR disc has ~1200 encoded files on it.

Dolby Vision uses the HDR10 10K files as its base layer or there would have been even more files. HDR10+ uses the same encoded HDR10 10K files, but they are a copy of the files because some players will play HDR10+ over DV, so we wanted to eliminate that issue. The work around is to disable HDR10+ in a player, which is inconvenient.

If anyone has specific questions about any of the discs, we can answer them.

Disc 1 is a 3-layer disc. Most HDR test patterns in DV, 10+ and 10 (350, 600, 1000, 2000, 4000 and 10,000)
Disc 2 is a 3-layer disc. Continuation of disc 1 with two additional HDR patterns in 24p and 60p (HFR), HDR skin tones and all montages.
Disc 3 is a 2-layer disc. SDR content in 709 and 2020, including skin tones, and all Atmos / DTS-X test tones. DTS-X does not "really" support 6 overhead speakers, so we have disabled the 6-channel option. In our testing we found that the sounds came out of the front and rear speakers to create a phantom image in the middle speakers. The 6-channel files are still on disc and can be selected via the audio menu when playing the Atmos version or through a key sequence on the menu to enable the radio buttons. (Don't recall the sequence off hand)

The HDR disc 1 has a hidden DV test pattern that is only available when DV is selected. It will show if DV is working correctly and point out the issue with DV LL mode being broken. We hid to to not scare the masses as there are cases where it will show a fail even when good, such as on an LG when you select Cinema Home vs. Cinema. Cinema Home (starting with C9) converts DV 2.9 into 4.0 for the ambient light feature and the way we show the error does not work under DV 4.0. They changed the algorithm for that feature in 4.0 so it does not have the same behavior. We will show the press how to find and interpret the results and then I am sure it will leak from there.

The HDR disc does have A/V sync patterns, so not all audio is on disc 3. We offer A/V sync in 24p, 60p, HD and UHD plus all HDr and SDR formats.

The reason the 2nd HDR disc has the skin tones is that we ran out of room on the first disc. Same for the two extra patterns. In case anyone wonders why SDR skin tones is on the SDR disc, but HDR skin tones are on a separate disc.

It appears that either the players or Scenarist is stripping the HLG flag we use from the SEI message, so your TV will still need a manual setting to force HLG. If you play the file itself as an MP4, then the TV will go into HLG mode either through the Panasonic player or the TV directly. Playing the file on OPPO does not auto trigger.

We offer a specialty menu that is not tied to the global nit menu. This is because we added a 0-nit HDR10 option to see how a player handles metadata being set to 0. This is also where we have a few DV Absolute mode test patterns. Absolute mode turns off tone / gamut mapping. If you are viewing a pattern in DV Absolute mode and bring up the pop-up menu, tone mapping gets turned back on. We believe this is the menu tone mapping. When this happens, you have to switch back to Perceptual and back to Absolute again.

All Window patterns are available in DV Perceptual (default), Absolute and Relative modes similar to what CalMAN uses through a couple pattern generators to calibrate DV. However, it looks like all UHD BD players don't handle these correctly and when Relative mode is selected, the TV is in the wrong color space. You can tell because the pop-menu has weird color in addition to the patterns being the wrong color. So as of today, the Relative patterns don't work correctly on disc. If you take the files off disc and play on the display directly, then they work as intended. Just one of the many DV bugs on BD.

If you have not had your DV mode calibrated, at least on an LG, then the skin tones will appear darker than HDR10. If the config file has the proper nits, then they should be pretty close. DV2.9 is more impacted by random high nit outlier pixels. In this case, the entire frame is under 200 nits, except for some pings on earrings and a bolt on the ColorChecker chart. These are closer to 800 nits and that is what is causing DV to go darker. We even removed the pixels from the metadata or it was actually much darker.

[Geoff D]

This is like Duke Nukem Forever all over again

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

This is like Duke Nukem Forever all over again

True in that both eventually shipped / will ship. Hopefully not the same disappointment though.

Other than bug fixing / re-encoding, the content was encoded 1.5 years ago. It has been in authoring all this time with David finding work arounds to Scenarist.

What happens is that after the import of so many files, Scenarist will no longer let you save the project and in some cases mux the project. This is when a new project is created. The issue now is when they are combined, some times files get overwritten. The really sad part is that David had fixed a bunch of issues and could not save, but could mux. Eventually it was either a Windows update or a BSOD that screwed us over even more when the machine was rebooted.

Normally when I go on vacation, I turn off phone and email for the entire time. Sadly my last three vacations I have not been able to do this because I am looking for disc updates, so the stress is ever present.

[ij72]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

This is like Duke Nukem Forever all over again

Nah, for that to be true, this would have had to have originally started as a DVD benchmark when announced.

[Geoff D]

Originally Posted by ij72

Nah, for that to be true, this would have had to have originally started as a DVD benchmark when announced.

UHD ages in dog years tho

[JurassicBD]

Glad amazon was sold out of the current disc this morning, as we were finally going to bite using cashback rewards from all our Christmas and black friday buying to pay for it. Will hold out a little longer, unless we find the current release steeply discounted somewhere first.

[kenkraly2004]

Just got the disc this past weekend in the mail Spears & Munsil UHD HDR Benchmark Calibration Disc and I love it nice work by all who made the disc !!!

[Stacey Spears]

We are waiting to get results back from running disc 1 through the Panasonic Verifier. Hopefully this week or next.

[batman2000]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

We are waiting to get results back from running disc 1 through the Panasonic Verifier. Hopefully this week or next.

You adding all the versions of hdr to help calibrate that matter to this hdr hdr 10+ and Dolby vision I think thats all the major players that actually have uses in most of the platforms.

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by batman2000

You adding all the versions of hdr to help calibrate that matter to this hdr hdr 10+ and Dolby vision I think thats all the major players that actually have uses in most of the platforms.

Disc 1 has DV, HDR10+ and HDR10 for all patterns.

[Stacey Spears]

Disc 1 has been sent to Sony.

[Scarriere]

Of my two Sony tvs, one is ISF Calibrated, the other is not.
I'm interested in this disc.

[Stacey Spears]

Here are some initial renders of the new disc.

[lgans316]

No slip = No sale

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by lgans316

No slip = No sale

Slip?

[witheygull]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

Slip?

Slipcover. Some folks are obsessive over them and want them on every release, though I believe the above poster was being cheeky.