Spears & Munsil Blu-ray Test Disc

[BluLobsta]

Spears & Munsil HD Benchmark 3D Blu-ray 2nd Edition




Spears & Munsil High-Definition Benchmark Blu-ray

Spears & Munsil High-Definition Benchmark

Courtesy The Digital Bits -

Stacey Spears and Don Munsil, creators of the 'DVD Player Benchmark and Progressive Scan Shootout' at Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity, have just announced the forthcoming release of the 'Spears & Munsil High Definition Benchmark: Blu-ray Edition' test disc. Available now (SRP $24.99), the disc features "test material and calibration patterns to help home theater enthusiasts evaluate displays and players and adjust their home theater systems to get the best possible picture."

Very cool I do believe

[LOTR07]

Originally Posted by BluLobsta

Courtesy The Digital Bits -

Stacey Spears and Don Munsil, creators of the 'DVD Player Benchmark and Progressive Scan Shootout' at Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity, have just announced the forthcoming release of the 'Spears & Munsil High Definition Benchmark: Blu-ray Edition' test disc. Available now (SRP $24.99), the disc features "test material and calibration patterns to help home theater enthusiasts evaluate displays and players and adjust their home theater systems to get the best possible picture."

Very cool I do believe

yes it is. how would this compare to Joe Kanes DVE? Will have to get this disk and find out.

[Johnny Vinyl]

Will this be similar to a DVE:HD Basics disc?

John

[neo235]

No i dont think so

[jkwest]

Originally Posted by neo235

No i dont think so

in a bad way?

[gonk]

This disc is purely focused on video, so the audio test tones found on discs like DVE and AVIA are absent.

[dadkins]

Thanks for the Heads Up!
Will be looking for this soon.

Not a disc, but a smal free program NEC Monitor Test - if you have a PC connected to your TV...

http://tehnikservice.net/2008/03/dow...itor-test.html

Go here, scroll down, and download some more freebie tools:

http://www.webdoodles.org/pages/screentest.htm

[Stacey Spears]

If I would have seen this thread sooner, I would have chimed in. We have started an FAQ on our site to try and answer common questions. www.spearsandmunsil.com

Here are four screen shots showing the disc menus. The fifth image is one of the pop-up help menus found on the disc. For every pattern we include pop-up help.

[Stacey Spears]

This disc is purely focused on video, so the audio test tones found on discs like DVE and AVIA are absent.

The primary focus of this disc was video. The test tones on AVIA and DVE don't match. In turn, neither matches the tones built into an audio processor. We want to fully understand this before we put tones on a disc.

[Stacey Spears]

Will this be similar to a DVE:HD Basics disc?

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 Kane 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 hidden title, 127, 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. 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.

[Johnny Vinyl]

Welcome Stacey! And thank you so much for your posts so far. They have been highly enlightening!

John

[BluLobsta]

Wow, thanks Stacey! I never would have thought for a moment that the author of this disc would have replied to this thread. Your project sounds absolutely amazing, the end result looks incredible and this is something that I will be picking up for sure. You and Don have produced something that can really help us laypersons get the most out of our home theaters. Thanks again!

[Stacey Spears]

If you have any questions, we will do our best to answer.

[jkwest]

welcome!!

I love seeing this sort of stuff.

[johaen]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

If you have any questions, we will do our best to answer.

I am not entirely satisfied with DVE's explanation on how to use the SMPTE color bars. Basically, they tell you how to use the blue color filter, but after that, they only say that using the green and red color filters should have the expected results. But if the red and green color filters do not show accurate levels, they don't explain how to fix it. My TV has 6 color adjustments for both saturation and hue, and I would expect I could use these to help fix the colors. But it would be nice if the disk explained what adjustments to make. Does your disk included any sort of explanations on how you can use the green and red filters to improve your picture even further?

[BluCheez]

I recently jumped into the more serious calibration fray after I downloaded the free ITU-R BT.709 AVCHD from AVSformus.com, created by alluringreality and hwjohn. It really helped with black and white levels and sharpness. My Sony XBR4 has never looked better. Unfortunately, I don't have any filters, so I wasn't able to do much with the colors.

A few quick questions for Stacey:
1) Can I order your disc from Canada on Amazon.com?
2) I looked on your site FAQ and you say that you do not supply any color filters. How then can I calibrate color? (... and if I need filters, can you recommend where I can purchase them on-line?)
3) Do you discuss how to deal with the White Balance? The color calibration on the disc I have ignores it completely.
4) Are you familiar with the disc that I downloaded? (ITU-R BT.709 AVCHD) http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=948496
What would your disc do for me and my LCD that this free disc does not? (i.e. is it worth the $$?)

Thanks!

[BStecke]

The pop up help menus are a really great idea. For people who don't use these patterns on a regular basis (such as myself) it can be annoying to have to sit through the whole intro of a pattern just to find out what exactly you're looking for when you do end up popping the disc in.

[jw]

Here's the Amazon link for anyone that needs to order:

Spears & Munsil High-Definition Benchmark

[Johnny Vinyl]

Originally Posted by BluCheez

Can I order your disc from Canada on Amazon.com?

Yes!

John

[owa]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

If you have any questions, we will do our best to answer.

Thanks for the information and screenshots.

Originally Posted by jwbbud

Here's the Amazon link for anyone that needs to order:

Spears & Munsil High-Definition Benchmark

Thanks for the link.