Calibration

[Lee Christie]

Hi, I'm not new to the forum but this is a n00b question so I put it here.

How do I calibrate my display so the "black bars" look black, not grey*** (I can fix that by turning the gamma down a bit but then everyone's faces look purple), and how do I reduce image noise, (most of my Blu-rays look speckley up close**, and turning on "noise reduction" in my NVIDIA control panel does nothing - makes it neither better nor worse)?

I'm using CyberLink PowerDVD Ultra*, graphic card: NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GTX, monitor: Samsung SyncMaster 245B.

Thanks.

* I cannot disable Hardware Acceleration in CyberLink for Blu-rays, my graphics card seems to force itself to override any of CyberLink's video settings.

** EDIT: "dithered" is what i meant to say, you know like you get in GIF images, my the colors don't blend togethor properly, like this:


(but not that extreme, it's not that bad)

*** EDIT: also, i read the posts about black bars, everyone just says "they're normal, calibrate your display so they look black and turn the lights off", but how do you make them look black?

[JBlacklow]

I'd need a little more info to pinpoint the problem (OS, driver version, PowerDVD version), but I might still be able to help out. This is a long post, but it should be comprehensive and get you the PQ you want, as well as the dark bars.

The likely problem is that you are calibrating the source, not the display. You should almost always start calibration at the display. So, the first thing I would do would be to reset both your PowerDVD video settings and your nVidia control panel video settings to what they were "out of the box" (as it were). Even better would be to uninstall and reinstall both, in this order:

1a) Uninstall PowerDVD.
1b) If necessary, download latest nVidia display drivers, which really does make a difference (IMO) in how well PowerDVD runs. 163.71 for XP or 163.69 for Vista 32-bit. I wouldn't even be running Vista 64.
2) Uninstall the nVidia drivers. The PC should ask you to restart. If not, restart after uninstall is complete.
3) After the restart, install nVidia display drivers, which should ask you to restart. If not, restart after install is complete.
4) After restart, open up the nVidia control panel. Under Video & Television->Adjust video color settings, make sure that all the controls are as follows (don't forget to hit "Apply" after each changes):

Standard tab: Everything at 50% (Gamma should be grayed out and/or at 0%), "Apply these settings to all video tech" checked.
RGB Gamma tab:"Use RGB Gamma" unchecked and everything should be grayed out.
Correction tab: Select "Do not use color temp correction"
Enhancements: Everything should be at 0% and "Use inverse telecine" should be unchecked. *NOTE: Some have mentioned putting NR up one tick. I'd just as soon leave it alone unless someone can convince me otherwise.

5) After applying all settings, close nVidia control panel and restart.
6) After restart, install PowerDVD. Ensure that you have the latest version (IIRC it's 7.3104a or something like that). After you install PowerDVD, restart again. I know, it's a lot of restarts, but this is the last one. I promise!
7) After restart open up PowerDVD but do not play a disc. Go to Configuration (Ctrl-C), and go to the Video tab. If possible, select "Use color profile" and select "Original". Depending on your PC hardware, you may or may not want to check "Enable hardware acceleration". Apply the settings and play a disc to test which setting causes the least playback issues like dropped frames or stuttering. When you get that setting working, play the disc again, go to the PowerDVD Video tab again, click on the "Advanced..." button, and check for the Video Quality tab. If it's there, select "Best Quality". Apply all the settings, stop the disc, and quit PowerDVD.

You should now have your source (i.e. your video card/drivers and PowerDVD) and what are essentially baseline. Now it's time to calibrate the display! There's several ways of doing this, but the easiest is through the "0 to 100 IRE Split bar" test pattern at http://www.w6rz.net/, which should work in PowerDVD. If they don't, download VLC from http://videolan.org to play them back. Essentially, you want to drag and drop the TS file into PowerDVD (or VLC), pause it immediately, and go to full screen. Now, your Samsung monitor should have a button for video controls of it's own. You're looking for the one that has controls for Brightness and Contrast/Picture. Select the Brightness control and turn it down until you can just barely tell the difference between the two blackest bars. If you want, you can set your Contrast/Picture control as well, but I'd save that for more extensive calibrations (see below). For now, I'd set it to around the 75% mark, although you could also set it around the 50% mark to compare. If there are Color controls, see if they have a temperature or tone and set it to "Warm" and for quality presets, turn it to Original or Off. If you've done everything right, the black bars should black (or reasonably so), you're movies should look like movies. You may not have radioactive reds and the screen may be a little dimmer than you are used to, but that's what you want for good movie PQ.

If you want to delve a little further, there are DVDs such as Digital Video Essentials, Avia, or the GetGray disc from http://www.calibrate.tv that can walk you through the process, although DVE has a Blu-ray version coming out on Oct 30 that I would pick up instead, or the Avia Blu-ray early next year. Another method is to get a Sony-made BD (it has to be from Sony Pictures) and while the menu or movie is playing, input the code 7-6-6-9 to bring up about a minute of test patterns and pause it on the black-grey-white bars, but there's nothing to help you out.

Whew! Monster post, but there you go. Let us know how it turns out!

[Sir Terrence]

Originally Posted by Lee Christie

Hi, I'm not new to the forum but this is a n00b question so I put it here.

How do I calibrate my display so the "black bars" look black, not grey*** (I can fix that by turning the gamma down a bit but then everyone's faces look purple), and how do I reduce image noise, (most of my Blu-rays look speckley up close**, and turning on "noise reduction" in my NVIDIA control panel does nothing - makes it neither better nor worse)?

I'm using CyberLink PowerDVD Ultra*, graphic card: NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GTX, monitor: Samsung SyncMaster 245B.

Thanks.

* I cannot disable Hardware Acceleration in CyberLink for Blu-rays, my graphics card seems to force itself to override any of CyberLink's video settings.

** EDIT: "dithered" is what i meant to say, you know like you get in GIF images, my the colors don't blend togethor properly, like this:


(but not that extreme, it's not that bad)

*** EDIT: also, i read the posts about black bars, everyone just says "they're normal, calibrate your display so they look black and turn the lights off", but how do you make them look black?

Lee,
If you are using a LCD computer monitor it may be impossible to deepen your black levels without some adverse thing happening to other aspects of the picture. You may try and lowering the contrast, and raise the brightness. If you want to be more accurate, try using video essentials calibration disc, or if you have a THX certified copy of any movie, use the optimode calibration signals in the menu.

[Lee Christie]

Operating System: 64-bit Windows Vista™ Ultimate (6000.vista_gdr.070627-1500)
Motherboard Model: Asus P5KC
BIOS: Date: 06/08/07 14:25:42 Ver: 08.00.12
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU @ 2.40GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.4GHz
Memory: 2046MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 10

Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT
Display Memory: 1272 MB
Dedicated Memory: 504 MB
Shared Memory: 767 MB
Driver Version: NVIDIA ForceWare 162.22

Monitor: Samsung SM-245B 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Black (Digital)
Cable: Belkin PRO Series Digital Video Interface Cable - dual link DVI-D
Current Mode: 1920 x 1200 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Driver Version: 7.15.0011.6222 (English)

Drive: Pioneer BDC-202BK 5x BD-ROM + 12x12 DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer OEM
Software: CyberLink PowerDVD 7.3 (Ultra)

Thanks for your responses, I'll look at what I can do. I see the latest NVIDIA driver is 163.69, my bad for letting it get out of date but I'm skeptical it will make a difference, but hopefully it will... I'll be back.

I heard about the Blu-ray DVE comming up, do you think it'll be worth buying?

[JBlacklow]

Originally Posted by Lee Christie

Thanks for your responses, I'll look at what I can do. I see the latest NVIDIA driver is 163.69, my bad for letting it get out of date but I'm skeptical it will make a difference, but hopefully it will... I'll be back.

Just be sure to get the Vista64 driver. I only linked to the XP and Vista32 drivers, since I've heard nothing but bad things about Vista64 and video.

The important thing is to reset those video and PowerDVD settings, and only calibrate the monitor, not nVidia or PowerDVD.

I heard about the Blu-ray DVE comming up, do you think it'll be worth buying?

Hopefully. I've got the DVE, Avia, and GetGray DVDs, and the DVE Blu-ray on pre-order. SUpposedly, it's easier to use than the old DVD.

[Lee Christie]

Originally Posted by JBlacklow

Hopefully. I've got the DVE, Avia, and GetGray DVDs, and the DVE Blu-ray on pre-order. SUpposedly, it's easier to use than the old DVD.

Looks like I have the right person to ask about calibration.

Originally Posted by JBlacklow

Just be sure to get the Vista64 driver. I only linked to the XP and Vista32 drivers, since I've heard nothing but bad things about Vista64 and video.

Yeh I didn't use your link I went to the nvidia page to make sure.


Anyway, I've finished following your steps, the bars thing shows 11 bars (from very-nearly black to light grey), even when I turn the brightness down to zero, I can still tell the two blackest ones apart and the black bars in the movie are still not 100% black.

HOWEVER, the good news is that turning brightness down to zero causes the dithering to no longer be viable (except on certain bit under close inspection) - with the side effect that the who screen is now quite dark.

Also, I don't have the option to DISABLE thehardware acceleration in PowerDVD when playing Blu-rays because it forces the enable checkbox to be checked, I can uncheck it for DVD playback but not for Blu-ray.

Oh, and that 7-6-6-9 easter egg, I tried that before but it didn't work,I tried two different Sony Pictures discs and nothing happed, tried both the number pad on my keyboard and the cyberlink remote but nothing.

[Lee Christie]

I've been using this with the brightness turned way down for a while now to see if I get used to it, but it still doesn't seem right, the colours don't jump out at me enough any more, it's not vibrant enough and the black bars are still noticeably grey.

I can still see the dithering a little and having the image really dark seems like covering up the problem not fixing it.

I've tried fiddling with the contrast and the gamma too but nothing seems to work. I obviously just don't know how to calibrate.

[Deciazulado]

Lee, computer 8-bit color goes from level 0 black to level 255 white.

But on video, "black" is at level 16 and "white"' at level 235



Now, first you have to have your computer/display calibrated correctly using the normal 0-255 values of a computer signal and at least using gamma 2.2 (would mean that 100% RGB 255 255 255 white would be the brightest output of your LCD and 0% RGB 0 0 0 black would be the darkest, and this works basically with CRTs, but since LCDs have (relatively) weak blacks, just putting RGB 0 0 0 as the darkest thing on the monitor usually leaves the on screen image a little too light (real visual gamma less than 2.2) so you have to keep darkening the brightness a little bit more (that's where you use the PLUGE or actually a light meter/monitor profiler calibration thing). When the computer says it's giving you 2.2 gamma, a grey scale should measure 2.2 gamma in slope (means the gray patches lighten up with a 2.2 "slope"" as you measure their light output increase against their RGB value increase). The quick and easy way is to make the PLUGE as dark as it can go (you'd need be displaying a color bar pattern in 0-255 computer levels in your computer from a jpeg, bipmap tiff etc ).

Now that we've gone through that for the computer output, and the thing is calibrated, you need to do the same with the video signal output from your software player if it's in 16-235 levels. You have to make 16 -> 0 (that will make black letterbox bars black), and 235 -> 255 (that will bring back snap and brightness to the video). I don't have PowerDVD but doesn't it have some basic color controls?

The black on a video color bar (16) is brought down to the black of the computer output (0) and the white of the video color bar (235) is brought up to the white of the computer output (255). The color bars should then be measuring, or adjusted to measure RGB 191 if memory serves me right (example red = RGB 191 0 0, yellow = RGB 191 191 0) (You're remapping/calibrating the video values to the calibratedcomputer values.)

Hope this helped, is this is what your lighter than black letterboxbars problem is.

[Lee Christie]

Thanks for your explaination, I know all about computer displays (not so much about video/NTSC though but I was recently told they use the range 16-235.. why they didn't pick 0-219 is they wanted 220 values beets me, it would have stomped out the grey bars problem)

Anyway, you asked if PowerDVD has some basic colour controls well, yes, very basic. It has four options:

Original
Vivid (makes it a little worse)
Bright (makes it a lot worse)
Theater (same brightness a Vivid but the colours are a little different)

Perhaps there's some sort of advanced controls somewhere, or manual configuration but I can't find it.

The only way I can actually do anything is by adjusting the NVIDIA control panel and my monitor, and I've had no luck.

[Lee Christie]

Originally Posted by Lee Christie

Perhaps there's some sort of advanced controls somewhere, or manual configuration but I can't find it.

Hmm.. I've just installed Vista 32-bit instead of 64-bit and now it looks like there's an extra tab in the advanced settings for colour control. Either it wasn't there under 64-bit Vista, or I just failed to notice it.

Knowing me, it's probably the later.