Pinnacle DC10+ Color Calibration

[neo_sapien]

I've been trying to color calibrate the DC10+. Using my Attack of the Clones disc's THX calibration tests, I first calibrated my TV using a DVD set-top box. Then, I hooked the set-top box to the S-Video in on the DC10+, and hooked the TV to the composite out, and reran the THX tests so it came out as close to normal as possible on the TV. I didn't have the special blue glasses or THX glasses, so I just did what I could. Here's the settings I came up with:

Color Calibrated THX Test Star Wars AOTC Disk (measured using Pinnacle Studio 8 notches)
Brightness- -3
Contrast- -6
Sharpness- +9
Hue- 0
Saturation- 0

Using AMCAP video properties:
Brightness- -18
Contrast- -37
Sharpness- +48
Hue- -1
Saturation- -1


Now, the tv output seems to look fine with these settings. What looks really dark on the computer looks fine on the TV. I'm not noticing any shiny foreheads either. It's slighly less color rich than a direct link from the source (Digital satellite receiver) to the TV, but I guess this is as good as it gets.

Odd, though, that what looks dark or shiny on the monitor looks almost exactly right on the TV.

[neo_sapien]

Here are three screenshots, one is the DVD frameserved, another is captured by the DC10+ card with mjpegcorrect enabled, another is captured by the DC10+ card with mjpegcorrect disabled:

DVD (http://home.covad.net/~wlabiche/CAPTEST/DVDRip_ch33.PNG)
TVCAP (http://home.covad.net/~wlabiche/CAPTEST/TVCap_ch33.PNG)
TVCAP w/no mjpegcorrect (http://home.covad.net/~wlabiche/CAPTEST/TVCap_nocorrect_ch33.PNG)

[Herske]

Nice job, I wish someone would do that for other capture cards.

Odd, though, that what looks dark or shiny on the monitor looks almost exactly right on the TV

That's right, a TV has much higher gamma compared to a computer monitor.

[neo_sapien]

Originally posted by Herske
Nice job, I wish someone would do that for other capture cards.

Well, it would be harder to do that for say, a WinTV Radio, which I also have, as it lacks a video out (to connect to the tv and calibrate from there). I wonder if the image outputted by a Geforce 3's Tv-out would be exactly the same as the image outputted by a DC10's video out? As in, unaffected by the PC gamma difference. Anyway, assuming it would, you would have to hook up the tv-out to your TV, run Virtualdub and calibrate from your TV using the source-device settings.

[neo_sapien]

I've got a 2 minute sample from AOTC which I encoded into SBC + Vorbis and put in an ogg container. It's nice and colorful like the THX AOTC sample, so it should show off the capture nicely when played back on a TV. I have to be really conservative with my webspace, so if you want to see the quality, please pm me and I'll link you to my FTP server (I only turn it on when people need it). The sample is 14.9 megs.

[obiwan71]

I captured Attack of the Clones last week. Here are the screenshots...
Screenshot with MJPEGcorrect enabled:
http://sbouf.free.fr/screenshot_aotc_mjpegcorrect.png
Screenshot with MJPEGcorrect disabled:
http://sbouf.free.fr/screenshot_aotc_nomjpegcorrect.png
(DC10+)