Spears & Munsil Blu-ray Test Disc

[HDTV1080P]

Originally Posted by 145gtw

For those unaware, the UHD Edition is now available.

The official thread for this 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray disc is located at the following link


https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=318227

[rickardl]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

Turn contrast up until the highest bar you have clips and bring it back down one clip. Make sure that this does not cause RGB squares on the clipping pattern to clip. That will be the highest you can set contrast.

Next, Look at the gradient/ramp in the middle of the contrast pattern. Turn it down, from the top point you found and see if you can find the position where it is the smoothest. Sometimes its at the highest point, sometimes a few clicks below.

I am restarting this old thread about the HD benchmark disc...
In the past, I have been looking at the bars with numbers on this pattern
http://spearsandmunsil.com/wp-conten...Contrast_Y.png
and I have been able to see the 253 bar against the 254 white background with the Contrast setting up to about 95 (out of 100) and even higher on my Samsung Plasma.
But I noticed blooming on lamps, clouds and very visible film grain, especially on skies on black and white movies and I have therefore reduced the Contrast setting by visually looking at real content in movies.
The Contrast setting then ended up around 85 instead.
I don't recall why, but I recently looked at the ramp instead and read the help text

The ramp in the center that goes from black to white and back should have a very thin white stripe in the center, but no other streaks or bands.

and started adjusting the Contrast down.
The "stripe" in the middle should be really thin, right? Almost not visible as a stripe but rather a smooth continuous ramp since the middle section here

,between the upper and lower 242 bar, is actually going from left 242 up to 254 and down to 242 again to the right side.
With a smooth continuous ramp and basically no stripe in the middle, I end up with a Contrast setting of 72.
Here is a blow-up of the middle section:

This might be just how my plasma behaves but I get a really good picture with no blooming at all and film grain that were very visible and "intrusive" before, now look more like fine velvet.
The downside is that the picture is darker.

The odd thing is that using the bars vs the ramp gave completely different Contrast settings, I wonder if that is common or if it just my plasma that is "odd".

[Stacey Spears]

The ramp in the middle goes from 1-254-1. So close to the center might look like:

250, 250, 250, 251, 251, 251, 252, 252, 252, 253, 253, 253, 254, 253, 253, 253, 252, 252, 252, 251, 251, 251, 250, 250, 250.

I don't recall home many times each code value is repeated on the gradient, but the center value of 254 is only used one time.

If turning contrast down reduces the bloom, then I would stick with that.

The stripe down the center will be distinct similar to the image you posted with the rectangle.

The ramp and the bars use the same values, just different ways to view the same thing. As it starts to clip, that center line on the ramp will get wider and wider.

[rickardl]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

If turning contrast down reduces the bloom, then I would stick with that.

The stripe down the center will be distinct similar to the image you posted with the rectangle.

The ramp and the bars use the same values, just different ways to view the same thing. As it starts to clip, that center line on the ramp will get wider and wider.

Yeah, I am sticking with the non-blooming ramp.
If I go with the bars, I can see a slight difference up to 95 or maybe even 100 of the Contrast setting if I squint my eyes long enough.
But to get rid of all blooming in the ramp, 72 is the setting I am using.
And it looks good to me, especially clouds, skies, shiny foreheads and film "grain" overall.

[Stacey Spears]

Sorry for the silence. Have not wanted to post an update until close since I am tired of providing a date and missing it as I am sure you are too.

We finally finished testing / bug fixing the main HDR disc a couple weeks ago. We are testing the last (montage) disc right now. The package contains 2 x 100 GB and 1 x 66 GB discs.

Disc 1 - HDR Main. (All test patterns)
Disc 2 - HDR Skin Tones and (all) Montages. Also has two (four if you count the 60p versions) test patterns that would not fit on disc 1 since we ran out of space.
Disc 3 - SDR / Audio.

The included booklet is being formatted now and cover / disc art being finalized.

We expect to send all IMFs to Sony a week after Thanksgiving. Since it is the holidays, we think it will take 3-4 weeks to receive the check discs back for verification, but waiting to hear back to know for sure. Should be on sale in January, depending on how long it takes to replicate and ship to the distrubtor.

All of the window style patterns (Analysis menu) is offered in Perceptual, Absolute and Relative modes of Dolby Vision. We have one other section that offers a handful a patterns in Perceptual and Absolute to visually see what happens. The rest of the disc is just perceptual only. Perceptual is the normal Dolby Vision mode.

Dolby relative mode does not seem to work correctly on any UHD BD player. It is there if it ever gets fixed. The absolute mode works as long as you don't bring up the pop-up menu. Once you do, you have to switch to perceptual and then back to absolute mode. What happens is that when you pull up the pop-menu, it applies tone mapping. Absolute mode disables tone mapping, so when it gets switched back on, it does not work correctly anymore. OPPO has more DV issues than other players, but DV on BD is pretty buggy. So much so that I bought a MadVR Envy and just use HDR10 now.

If you have any specific questions on the new 3-disc set, ask away. I am planning to be offline 100% for a couple weeks at the end of the year.

[ckenisell]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

Sorry for the silence. Have not wanted to post an update until close since I am tired of providing a date and missing it as I am sure you are too.

We finally finished testing / bug fixing the main HDR disc a couple weeks ago. We are testing the last (montage) disc right now. The package contains 2 x 100 GB and 1 x 66 GB discs.

Disc 1 - HDR Main. (All test patterns)
Disc 2 - HDR Skin Tones and (all) Montages. Also has two (four if you count the 60p versions) test patterns that would not fit on disc 1 since we ran out of space.
Disc 3 - SDR / Audio.

The included booklet is being formatted now and cover / disc art being finalized.

We expect to send all IMFs to Sony a week after Thanksgiving. Since it is the holidays, we think it will take 3-4 weeks to receive the check discs back for verification, but waiting to hear back to know for sure. Should be on sale in January, depending on how long it takes to replicate and ship to the distrubtor.

All of the window style patterns (Analysis menu) is offered in Perceptual, Absolute and Relative modes of Dolby Vision. We have one other section that offers a handful a patterns in Perceptual and Absolute to visually see what happens. The rest of the disc is just perceptual only. Perceptual is the normal Dolby Vision mode.

Dolby relative mode does not seem to work correctly on any UHD BD player. It is there if it ever gets fixed. The absolute mode works as long as you don't bring up the pop-up menu. Once you do, you have to switch to perceptual and then back to absolute mode. What happens is that when you pull up the pop-menu, it applies tone mapping. Absolute mode disables tone mapping, so when it gets switched back on, it does not work correctly anymore. OPPO has more DV issues than other players, but DV on BD is pretty buggy. So much so that I bought a MadVR Envy and just use HDR10 now.

If you have any specific questions on the new 3-disc set, ask away. I am planning to be offline 100% for a couple weeks at the end of the year.

No HDR10+ mode?

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by ckenisell

No HDR10+ mode?

I was just commenting on the specific modes of Dolby Vision that are used for calibration.

The patterns are available in:
1. Dolby Vision
2. HDR10+
3. HDR10 (350, 600, 1000, 2000, 4000 and 10,000).
4. SDR 709 and SDR 2020

The audio test tones are in SDR 709 only since the video format does not matter outside of A/V Sync and those are available in all formats at 23.976, 59.94 frame rates and HD, UHD resolutions.

Skin Tones are in:
1. Dolby Vision
2. HDR10+
3. HDR10 1K

Montages are in:
1. Dolby Vision 10K
2. HDR10+ 10K
3. SL-HDR2 (Technicolor) 1K
4. HDR10 10K, 2K, 1K and 600
5. HDR vs. SDR (1K vs. 203)
6. Graded vs. Ungraded (1k vs. default exposure)
7. HDR Analyzer (10K analysis, 1K preview)
8. HLG
9. SDR

[ckenisell]

Awesome. Thanks Stacey.

[Wendell R. Breland]

Originally Posted by Stacey Spears

Sorry for the silence. Have not wanted to post an update until close since I am tired of providing a date and missing it as I am sure you are too.

No, not at all. In the CV-19 era just really glad you guys are still with us.

For DV content, have you folks tried out the Dolby VS10 engine like the one used by Dune, Zappiti and Zidoo? If so, thoughts?

Don't want to start a Lumagen vs madVR contest but would like a short essay on your pick of the Envy over the Radiance Pro.

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by Wendell R. Breland

No, not at all. In the CV-19 era just really glad you guys are still with us.

For DV content, have you folks tried out the Dolby VS10 engine like the one used by Dune, Zappiti and Zidoo? If so, thoughts?

Don't want to start a Lumagen vs madVR contest but would like a short essay on your pick of the Envy over the Radiance Pro.

The only thing close to VS10 that I have experienced is what the Sony UHD BD player does when converting HDR10 to Dolby Vision. I am not sure if that is real VS10 or something else. It does not perform well, but I have confirmed it suffers from the same issues that real DV, on BD, suffers from. e.g. I thought the horses in snow scene would look better when playing HDR10 back as DV through the Sony than the display tone mapping HDR10, but it was pretty ugly looking due to perceived clipping.

Some DV bugs you will encounter when using the new disc:

1. Dolby Vision on BD is using the 709 chroma upsampling algorithm instead of 2020. This results in a half a pixel vertical shift between luma and chroma.
2. Dolby seems to filter all chroma detail above 1080p. If you look at the chroma zone plate, the left and right half's are not dim, they are virtually black and white as the chroma detail is gone, but luma seems untouched.
3. The DVLL bug where they ignore the chroma weight trim pass control. This results in noise, banding and other issues that can be found on the current montage if you compare HDR10/DV to DVLL. We have a hidden pattern on the new disc that makes this very obvious. Vincent used it in one of his videos a year ago. It is a big red X. We hid it for a couple reasons. 1. Not to piss Dolby off out right. 2. It will cause confusion and panic as there are cases where it does not work, such as using Cinema Home mode on LG, which converts DV 2.9 to 4.0 and 4.0 does not behave the same as they put a safe guard in to not suck out all the chroma if you push the control to far. Basically we use the control to our advantage to suck all the color out. So when it works, we suck all the color out and hide the x. When the control is ignored, you see the x. There is still a faint outline of the x due to chroma subsampling.

When you play DV on the new disc, it is using the HDR10 10K encoded version of the file and what you see is simply the DV metadata being applied. HDR10+ uses the same encode, but is a copy of the file with 10+ metadata inserted. Because players will often play HDR10+ over DV if one file has both metadata, we have two copies of the file for three formats. I mention this so that you don't think something is wrong with the DV version of the file. If you disable DV at the player level and play the DV file, you see HDR10 10K natively.

We will share how to find it to the press, so they can report on it and it will leak from there. The goal is to keep the mainstream from finding it while you all will find it, but also understand how to read it.

Yea, to avoid madVR vs. Lumagen wars, I will just provide a comment. Mathias has implemented some fancy chroma upsampling algorithms that no one else has. He also added support so I could send 4K120 to an LG to fully bypass their front end processing, ensuring we get proper 5:5 frame repeat for 24p sources when the LG is in PC mode and the LG tone mapping is programmed to be defeated and instead track PQ and hard clip.

I still consider Dolby Vision tone mapping, especially in 4.0, as the king of the hill. Even their old 2.9, which BD uses, is still better than everything else out there. When trim passes are done correctly, they are also more "objectively correct" as you have the artist vision and not just "subjectively pleasing" algorithms.

One of the complaints of tone mapping can be the tone mapped image is too saturated. This is more with the front projector crowd when comparing madvR and Lumagen. I shared my SDR grade of the montage (not trim passed this time) and Mathias was sort of shocked because it is a lot more saturated than a normal tone mapped HDR to SDR. It is what people complained about with his tone mapping. With SDR, we can never produce the same colors as the HDR as they don't exist in the smaller gamut. So saturation is how we get the look we want and SDR looks different than HDR and we pushed each format.

Let me state another way. Shane, the colorist, took a few months break between the HDR and SDR grade. He did NOT reference the HDR grade when working on the SR version. He simply started from scratch and got what he could out of SDR. In fact, we even made some colors entirely different in the LA Skyline shot, which is something you can do easily when your source is RAW. A tone mapped version would never do that. Once that was all done, he did compare against the HDR and then sharpened up the SDR to try and achieve a similar level of perceptual sharpness that HDR has at its native peak luminance.

When you compare 4000 nits to 2000 nits or 2000 nits to 1000 nits, you will notice a perceived difference in sharpness. The higher contrast of the higher nit looks visually sharper. So far tone mapping algorithms don't seem to compensate for this. Dolby does a little with one of their trim controls, which we max, but still not the same.

On the last disc, if you compared the HDR to the SDR trim version, the SDR looks a lot softer. We did not sharpen to the point of ringing, but it is sharper if you compare a tone mapped HDR to SDR to the real graded SDR on the new disc.

As far as not posting, I have also been busy working on my car project. I bought a RAV4 Prime in 2021 and have been doing a lot of work. I ripped out the entire interior and applied sound damping material. Installed custom audio that is a fully active system with DSP control. Everything is time aligned, EQd for the driver only. Just had a custom cargo floor built to exhaust the heat and added LED side-lit acrylic. It has dual 10" subs.

If you are not familiar with car audio and what fully active means, it is similar to how Meridian DSP speakers work. Each driver gets a dedicated channel from the DSP amp, so a digital crossover is used. I have a 1000 x 6 and a 1000 x 4 channel amp. The 6-channel amp drives the A-pillar, dash and door speaker on each side and the 4 channel drives the two rear door speakers and then we bridge two channels to drive the dual 10" sub as a single channel. We added a 2nd 12-volt battery to ensure the headlights don't dim when the bass is thumping. Unlike cars that you can hear the bass down the street, along with the rattle, the bass is well contained within the car due to the 150+ lbs of sound damping material and a floating barrier. We use mass loaded vinyl with neoprene attached that sits on top of the butyl (sound damping rubber) When I say we, I mean the shop that did the install.

Digital audio is taken from the head unit and sent to the rear. It then goes through a Toslink splitter and into each DSP amp to reduce the number of D/A and A/D conversions in the chain. All of the audio is lossless from Apple Music via "wired" CarPlay. Wireless CarPlay gets re-encoded to lossy on the fly.







The design in the acrylic is the front grill. They felt it was too plain otherwise. They measured the front grill and re-created it in the CAD software, so it is to scale.


Orange power cables were used for the audio system to match the orange power cables used for the Hybrid system to match.


Here is the rear laser jammer:


Had coilovers installed last weekend to lower the vehicle. When we installed 20" wheels, the wheel gap became too large and ugly. All of the custom suspension parts, except the coilovers, came in blue, so we had to have them powder coated red.


All of the suspension parts that needed to be powder coated, sorry about the bad lighting.


I go back in a few weeks to get it corner balanced, which is usually just done for track cars, but why not.

Here is a custom face plate for the throttle controller, scanguage III, DSP preset knob, USB for CarPlay and USB for the DSP amp tuning. The other knob, higher up, is for the subs/bass, so you can tune to taste. There are four DSP presets. Two have the bass knob disabled, for its calibrated state and two allow you to tweak on the fly. One preset has the rear speakers turned way down low and delayed as much as possible for competition mode (No, I don't compete) and the other is using the DSP up mixer for the rear fills. Or at least will be once Brian does the re-turn with the new cargo floor.


And would any other license plate be appropriate?


Here is the gap when the new wheels were installed.


Here they are now. About to install some over fenders and will get it re-aligned and gap tweaked once the coilovers settle and the corner balance is complete. But you should be able to see the difference in gap. No, not for off road use.


Arc Audio is from my home town and I was lucky enough to get Brian Mitchell, of ARC Audio, to tune my system. Brian wins many audio competitions around the country.

Who says only our home systems can sound good!

The car was ceramic coated using Ceramic Pro gold package. PPF on the front end. Best advise I was given was to tell Toyota dealer not to wash the vehicle when it came off the truck to minimize marring / scratching / swirls and they listened. You can see some swirling in the black plastic portions, but the metallic gray sparkles like a diamond. Also did not install the front plate. Had magnets installed behind the front bumper and magnets in the front plate. It just snaps on when needed.

I am now having the suspension / under carriage ceramic coated to help with salt/brine when it snows. Should help keep it from corrosion. I also had exoshield installed on the windshield, but that is coming off. It gets micro scratches from the pressure washer and has some bubbles and other issues like visual distortion.

The level of detail I have put into the car is the same level of detail we have put into the disc and patterns.

Sorry for going WAY OFF TOPIC, but it does involve high end audio and references HDR.

[deatheats]

In regards to Dolby how receptive are they to the DV bugs being announced?

And does anyone think the UHD Blu-ray implementation of Dolby Vision will ever be upgraded?

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by deatheats

In regards to Dolby how receptive are they to the DV bugs being announced?

And does anyone think the UHD Blu-ray implementation of Dolby Vision will ever be upgraded?

They were aware of the DVLL bug before the previous disc shipped in 2019. They were made aware of the other DV bugs a year or two ago.

Perhaps if there is enough press coverage of the issues and customers complaining, they might feel pressure to ship an updated BD SDK with the issues fixed. At least that is my hope.

In theory, Panasonic could then incorporate a new SDK into their higher end players like the 820 and 9000. The players based on the MediaTek solution like Sony and OPPO are another matter. I believe the MediaTek team was disbanded around the time that OPPO closed up shop.

[Wendell R. Breland]

Thanks for the info on the VS10, upcoming disc and Envy comments.

Car, wow!! Never got into automotive but sure can appreciate your efforts. And the tag - really neat, very fitting for you.

Had a colleague that did production audio and he had a custom tag with MIC on it. After receiving the tag he had a custom transfer of a Neumann mic photo transferred to it.

[Stacey Spears]

The final two discs should go to Sony in the next week or two.

Due to the complexity and time it took to author, we will do an initial small run. This way if there are any serious bugs found and we need to make a fix, we have fewer discs to replace.

Here is a PDF of the booklet that will come in the package. We had a hard limit, by Sony, on page count. If anyone finds any typo's, feel free to post so we can correct before they are actually printed.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/uw70m57hd9...023_2.pdf?dl=0

And of course, if you have any questions, please ask away.

[Weasle]

It's not really a typo but, in case it helps, in the 3rd paragraph of the "How to Navigate the ULTRA HD Benchmark Disc Menus" section (page 4 of 28) the spelling sub-section and subsection are both used. It is a little odd seeing the same word written different ways in the one paragraph.

"To move to a sub-section, press the right arrow to move the highlight to one of the options on the current menu screen, then press the up arrow until a subsection name at the top of the screen is highlighted. Then use the left and right arrows to select the desired subsection."

There are a few other occurrences in the following paragraphs too.

[Stacey Spears]

Originally Posted by Weasle

It is a little odd seeing the same word written different ways in the one paragraph.

Thank you! It is always nice to have a fresh pair of eyes. This is exactly the type of feedback we are looking for.

[deatheats]

Also quite small, but one of the headings reads, “HDMI cables and connections” rather than, “HDMI Cables and Connections”.

“If you don’t have a Ultra HD…” vs “…an Ultra HD…”. There is some usage of, “a UHD” in the same section.

[Stacey Spears]

Here is an updated PDF.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1yxeampnk0...023_3.pdf?dl=0

[Stacey Spears]

Here are some cell phone photos from the menus and an xls. The XLS will be cleaned up a bit for posting on the website.
1. PCA Spreadsheet

2. PCA pop-up help text (for the spreadsheet above. Has a typo (cd/m2 instead of cd/m² that we decided not to fix.))


3. Specialty menu page


4. Skin Tone menu


5. Montage menu (the person that took this image, me, could not hold the phone straight!)

[Wendell R. Breland]

Stacey, will you use Scenic Labs to publish the upcoming disc release? I ask because could you or Jason Rosenfeld point me to info about the cost of UHD Blu-ray replication.