Testing various LaserDisc equipment
 

Ok, I've just started a new topic to show the realtime footage using both of my LaserDisc players and various capture cards. Before I post 12 different captures of realtime scene I am going to be posting 2 quick captures of the test pattern of Snell & Wilcox. Pioneer Elite LD-S2 was used for both.

File titled '01. Video Essentials.avi' was recorded outputting S-Video into AIW 7500.
File titled '02. Video Essentials.avi' was recorded outputting Composite BNC into Panasonic DMR-ES25 and then outputting Component video (Red, Green, Blue) into a Conexant based USB capture stick. Notice how it takes 3 frames for motion adaptive 3D comb filter to kick in.

Now comes the realtime capture samples. A little background. This is part of the rock concert that took place in Germany in 1990. It was shot by PAL cameras. It was pressed on PAL VHS for European viewers, NTSC VHS for North American viewers and Japanese NTSC LaserDisc for Asian viewers in 1990. In 2015 it was remastered into PAL DVD and PAL BluRay but I thought remastering was horrible. Besides 12 LaserDisc samples I intend to include the same sample from PAL VHS done by someone else and the same sample from DVD remaster. It will probably take me several posts to attach all the 14 files. But here we go.

Here is the description of the hardware workflow used. Some of the captures done using S-Video outputs directly into the capture card thus omitting motion adaptive 3D comb filters. Others are done outputting Composite into capture cards or DVD recorder with motion adaptive 3D comb filters. I personally don't see much of visual difference between all the captures. The only difference I noticed is when I used inferior player Pioneer CLD-D703. The image is grainy. But even then the difference between motion adaptive 3D comb filter and direct S-Video is none. The other difference I noticed is when I used Compro VideoMate card. For some reason it gives very blurry image. I don't know what's wrong with this card.

01. Live In East-Berlin.avi

Pioneer Elite LD-S2 -> BNC Composite -> Panasonic DMR-ES25 -> Component -> Conexant based USB stick.


02. Live In East-Berlin.avi

Pioneer Elite LD-S2 -> S-Video 1 -> ATI All In Wonder 7500


03. Live In East-Berlin.avi

Pioneer CLD-D703 -> Composite -> ATI TV Wonder HD 750 PCIe


04. Live In East-Berlin.avi

Pioneer Elite LD-S2 -> S-Video 2 -> OneTouch VC500 (Conexant based USB stick)


05. Live In East-Berlin.avi

Pioneer CLD-D703 -> S-Video -> ATI TV Wonder HD 750 USB


06. Live In East-Berlin.avi

Pioneer Elite LD-S2 (before video level was lowered down) -> BNC Composite -> Panasonic DMR-ES25 -> Component -> Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle Thunderbolt
Recorded into uncompressed 8 bit MOV. Converted to Huffyuv AVI using QTInput from AVISynth.


07. Live In East-Berlin.avi

Pioneer Elite LD-S2 (before video level was lowered down) -> BNC Composite -> ATI Theater 550 PRO


08. Live In East-Berlin.avi

Pioneer Elite LD-S2 (before video level was lowered down) -> BNC Composite -> Compro VideoMate TV Ultra


09. Live In East-Berlin.avi

Pioneer Elite LD-S2 (before video level was lowered down) -> S-Video 1 -> ATI AMD TV Wonder 600 USB


10. Live In East-Berlin.avi

Pioneer Elite LD-S2 (before video level was lowered down) -> BNC Composite -> ATI TV Wonder HD 750 PCIe


11. Live In East-Berlin.avi

Pioneer Elite LD-S2 (before video level was lowered down) -> S-Video 1 -> OneTouch VC500 (Conexant based USB stick)

Attachments 1 through 3

Attachments 4 through 6. Can moderators move all realtime attachments into one post later?

Let me know when you're done with this volley of posts. I'll clean it all up. :)

Attachments 4 through 6. Attempt 2.

Attachments 4 through 6. Attempt 3. :hmm:

Attachments 7 through 9.

Attachments 10 through 11 plus PAL VHS and PAL DVD samples.

Lordsmurf, I am done. If possible, move all 11 attachments (titled Live In East-Berlin) as well as VHS.m2v and Reissue.m2v into a second post. Thanks a lot.

Thanks for all y=this work with your samples.

But....why are the samples so washed out and pale? Even the black borders are greyed on most. Otherwise I'd say no single shot lasts long enough for evaluating anything in colored floodlights and heavily reprocessed masters. Except for differences in levels (one of which hit illegal limits, many of which are clipped at y=16), the main difference I see is that some are softer than others and none are particularly sharp. With this kind of video, apparently designed for viewers with severe attention deficit disorder, it comes down strictly to a matter of preference for most of the choices. None of it represents nature or reality very well, it's all show colors. So I'd advise: pick the one you like best.

Of course others might have a different take entirely. I just didn't have time to make all these uploads look more correct or "natural" for detailed evaluation. They have no dynamic range at all, so apparently these aren't tests for those qualities in a capture card. I didn't notice any dot crawl, if that's what you were aiming for.

Reissue.m2v is laughable indeed. Badly deinterlaced with a bunch of temporal information thrown away. Inexplicably pillarboxed to 16:9. Makes me wonder how these idiots get/keep their jobs.

I don't think this is good LD demo material for comb filter/workflow testing, because of how much the footage was abused by field blending PAL->NTSC.

I didn't compare all the files, but the DMR-ES25 is creating some nasty "moth-eaten" artifacts. Is the DNR definitely off for this input?

Hi Brad,

Yes, the DNR is definitely off on DMR-ES25. Well, that's the posterization artifact at its best. Still hoping to receive ADV7842 evaluation board.

I don't know how those idiots keep their job but unfortunately this is the case for most of the DVD and BluRay reissues in music industry now days. The BluRay reissue isn't better.

Hi Sanlyn,

Sanlyn, yes, these are the LaserDiscs I'm trying to digitize. Just the live shows which were filmed by PAL cameras at the time. I do have Video Essentials LD and I just ordered Video Standards LD. I guess I can make short samples of real scenes there, but many of my cards are gone now. ATI 600 USB, ATI 550 Theatre PCI, Blackmagic Intensity Pro - are all gone. Compro VideoMate is unplugged and is in the box. But the point I was trying to make is that for such scenes I don't see any rainbows or dot crawls regardless whether I go with motion adaptive 3D comb filter or without it.

Brad, you already looked at clip #10 which was done with LD-S2 and ATI TV Wonder HD 750 PCIe card. Now if you look at clip #3 which was done with CLD-D703 and also ATI TV Wonder HD 750 PCIe, you will see that CLD-D703 produces a lot more grain than LD-S2, but has better chroma. Now the question. In your opinion the lack of grain on the clip #10 due to heavy noise reduction or just lack of noise? Is it possible to apply some AVISynth noise filters to clip #3 to get rid of such grain and make the clip look very close to #10? Note: Noise Reduction were set to off on LD-S2 during the capture.

Hmm. I think you and lordsmurf are using that term to describe different effects.

Rainbows and dot crawl should only appear on sharp transitions. Since the video is so fuzzy from all the processing, it makes sense that you're not seeing these artifacts. (There is actually some dot crawl at the very top of 04, 07, and 11, because the vertical interval contains a 1-line test pattern with color on the right side. Therefore a sharp vertical color transition. The other capture devices don't include these lines in the output.)

Isn't the "better chroma" just due to capture settings? I don't think it's possible to produce an image from LaserDisc that noise-free without noise reduction, but the more techy members of LDDB would know much better than me. The guys who read circuit diagrams, specs of the chips used, etc. I did compare the two and couldn't find any details that were wiped away, but as already mentioned, there are barely details in the first place with this disc.

I'm definitely not the person to ask about that.

That vertical frequency noise isn't grain. Llooks like some type of RF herringbone or moire pattern and it's pretty much the same in every frame, so most denoisers won't see it as "noise". Smoothers, even where it would work (try dfttest), would result in hard gradient edges and block noise when re-encoding. So if this noise is removed you'll have to smooth gradient edges with another filter such as GradFun3 and apply some film-like grain to mask hard edges in large smooth areas like the smoky backgrounds. But that type of noise is tough to remove without losing detail. And there's very little hard detail to start with. I have no idea what caused it. Bad wire connection, maybe?

So if you don't want herringbone or similar noise and you still want smooth smoky backgrounds, you'll have to live with some grain.

I think it fits the definition of crosstalk here. Can't link to the subsection but if you CTRL+F for crosstalk it comes up.

This post mentions crosstalk but it's not clear to me whether the colorbars screenshot is meant to be a demo of that or not.

Definitely not. Take a look at these 2 images. Look at Chroma on CLD-D703 using ATI HD 750 and on LD-S2 using DMR-ES25. Now, I started to understand what Y / C delay is.

Seems a correct explanation to me. The noise wouildn't respond to any crosstalk/dot crawl filters I threw at it, degrainers had no effect, and de-freqency plugins ignored it. Dfttest at default smoothed it.

I don't understand the example. You're using two different players but no common control in between. How about using
the CLDD-D703/HD-750 combo and the LD-S2/HD-750 combo without the pass-thru unit? Are you sure the DMR-ES25 didn't screw things up? Why wasn't the DMR-ES25 used in both tests?

I often wonder why anyone would be using the ES25 anyway, I've never seen anyone recommend it for pass-thru. It's not equal to the ES10 or ES15 in correction power and all three ES's have a different look to them. But that's another story.

Very interesting indeed, thanks. I share Sanlyn's concern regarding the different workflows, but I assume you just uploaded clips that you had on hand.

Y/C delay is just an offset. Previously when you asked about it, I thought you knew this and you were just asking whether I could detect it in the image you sent.

This article provides frame numbers of the Video Essentials LD for a specific "delay" pattern. This and this have a couple photos.

BTW, some comb filter tests from Fudoh that I found while searching for Y/C delay images.

I own an ES15 & ES25, and used to own another ES15. I've tested them a lot. I haven't found any signal that I would say the ES15 decodes better than the ES25. I don't agree that they have a different "look" at all; the actual image quality seems identical when fed stable video.

It's tough to say they're identical with VHS sources, but I couldn't say any of the three was superior to one another except that the ES25 has the advantage of HDMI output, allowing me to bypass one D-A step. Getting way into the nitty-gritty, the two ES15s didn't even perform identically when fed simultaneous output from one playback of a tape. I sold the 2nd ES15 before my most recent test with truly horrible material, but ES25 vs ES15 simultaneous output didn't point to a winner. They each fail on different frames. Playing the tape again to the ES25 showed failure on yet different frames. No consistency.

I thought you owned 15s and a 20 but not a 25?

I used to have an ES20. Kept it as long as I could for its LSi chip and direct-to-DVD recordings with pristine VHS issues. But those few tapes were finished and discarded, so what was left were the poorly tracking and damaged tapes that the ES20's weaker tbc couldn't handle. The ES10 and ES15 had more effective tbc's in my experience and a better y/c comb filter. Eventually the ES20 developed aging problems, so it's no longer here. Then the ES15 went on the blitz, so I'm staying with my two ES10's when needed. My experience with the ES25 and other Pannies for pass-thru is from other posts.

When I don't need the more powerful tbc and don't have my AG-1980 in use because it misbehaves with some tape or other (that AG can be a cranky dude sometimes), but want more transparency in a pass-thru, I use my Toshiba RD-XS34. I saved my worst tapes for last. And thank heaven they're almost all completed!

I will redo the test with both players using the exact same capture equipment in a couple of days. Although it will not change chroma. Thank you gentlemen. More later.

Brad, I'm quoting the very first article that you provided:

"TV manufactures are always promoting the latest technology, naturally. Reading through the literature, you will probably notice that most new TVs this year are sporting 3D-Motion adaptive comb filters (comb filters separate the luminance "Y" from the chroma "C"). While these look fantastic on "static" images, when its time for motion, they must resort back to 2D processing. The logic that must decide when to switch from 3D to 2D is far from perfect, and often exhibits errors. A good example of the kind of errors I am talking about can be found on A Video Standard at the beginning of the disc. This is a color bar pattern with one bar that is changing colors. With a 3D filter, the bar exhibits a checkerboard-like pattern. The fact is that these 3D filters spend more time doing 2D work, and this is their weak point. Since your TV is spending more time in the 2D world, you want the BEST 2D filter you can get."

I'll leave it at here. :hmm: :laugh: So this is what I might incline to do. Just get DPS-575 to fix the delay and record with S-Video directly and forget about the rest (3D etc)....

It's true that those are the weaknesses of 3D comb filters, and you definitely want the 2D part of your 3D filter to be the best that there is. But realize that this specific article was written 20 years ago, before modern flatscreens brought a push for better digital filters for composite. The phrase "this is their weak point" was referring to the shiny new 3D!!!! Comb Filters! in that model year of TVs, not an inherent property of all 3D filters.

There you go. LD-S2 Composite output #1 (BNC) to ATI HD 750. As I previously mentioned the chroma resolution didn't get higher. :)

Are you sure "chroma resolution" is what you mean? What's the resolution of the higher chroma and the resolution of the lower one? Aren't they all 4:2:2?

Am I using a wrong terminology? If you look at 1.5 square, you will not see cyan color filled between the bars on LD-S2 image. But you will see cyan color on CLD-D703. So what is the right term?

Chroma bandwidth/resolution, I think both are fine.