Using Panasonic ES15 after Mitsubishi HD2000U, observations
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I have been testing a new HD2000U vcr with and without an ES15 using S-video. I have a passive video switch that allows me to insert or remove the ES15 from the workflow. I tested everything with and without the switch to make sure the switch did not introduce noise. It worked great whereas an active switch I tried failed miserably.
I first did tests with the vcr to see the effect of turning on and off the comb filter and the DNR+TBC. I didn't see any change with the filter, but the TBC did a great job taking care of a tape that had the upper part of the image leaning to the left. However, I couldn't see any difference in the noise level when previewing it in VirtuaDub. The ES15 has user settable input and output black level controls. I found it curious that the ES15 only allows lighter or darker settings for the input and s-video output. The component output allows lighter, normal, and darker. Any thoughts on why? Should I set the input or output to lighter and the other control to darker to get the rough equivalent of a normal-level pass through? For testing, I set the ES15 for lighter input and output. When the ES15 was switched in and out, the VirtualDub histogram did move to the right and then left as expected. A few things I found unusual is the ES15 sometimes raised the height of the right side of the histogram, put a small peak at the brightest point, and then sharply rolled off anything above what it considered to be the brightest level. It looked like it uses a high-pass filter to squash anything above a max brightness. See the attachment below for an example. The histogram looked similar to what I had when I cropped the sides and the bottom. I did a search and didn't find any information on this. Does it have a high-pass filter? The vcr never seemed to do this. It's brightest levels seemed to follow the natural roll off of the video source. So far, I haven't seen any effect of the TBCish part of the ES15. I guess I just haven't tried enough tapes yet. Question: I have set the ES15's TV Screen setup for 4:3 (480i) format, but there are additional options for setting letterbox or pan & scan. I assume these don't affect the pass through mode--true? I didn't see any change. Final question, should I remove the ES15 from the workflow until I run into something that the vcr can't handle? Will the introduction of additional electronics just raise the risk of video degradation when not needed? (Ok, I guess that's two questions, but whose counting. :wink2:) Thanks, Steve |
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It's IRE 0 (Japan NTSC, PAL) and IRE 7.5 (North America NTSC). "Lighter" assumes 0, and "darker" corrects 7.5 to 0 for DVD (and players then lift 0 back to 7.5). Some moron at Panasonic thought IRE would be too complicated a term -- so it was replaced by a stupid term that confuses everybody, even those that know about IRE. It should have been "Japan" and "North America", problem solved. The input setting seemingly does nothing. The output does what you need. The bigger problem is that Panasonic IRE and luma values were never correct anyway, not true 0 or 7.5, and often with various hue/gamma shifts. The ES10/15 wasn't as bad, but some Panasonic models were awful. Some recorders kept the IRE 7.5 for recording (records 7.5 as 0), so DVD were too light on playback, values wrong (equivalent of about 15). Many were guilty of this, but some models (like JVC LSI) also had flaws with the levels like Panasonic. So the 7.5 wasn't that high, often about a 5, and within normal tolerances of analog broadcasting. Quote:
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- If so, yes. - If not, no. It's your only line of defense for capture. Quote:
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When I asked "should I remove the ES15 from the workflow until I run into something that the vcr can't handle?" You said: "It depends. Any external TBCs in the workflow? - If so, yes. - If not, no. It's your only line of defense for capture." By "external TBC" do you mean just standalone TBCs and not a vcr with TBC? Or, do you mean any device separate from the ES15 which includes standalone devices and VCRs with line TBC? Again, thanks, Steve |
internal TBC = VCR TBC
external TBC = not VCR TBC No, that doesn't mean it's trying to make it Japanese/PAL. |
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