Tendo City

I'm a junky for calibrating my A/V equipment, if you have any idea what this means then you understand proper black levels and color saturation, etc.

Well I had never given it any thought, but the GC isn't calibrated at NTSC standards. This dumbfounded me, so as soon as I leanred this, I went to experiment.

First of all, proper calibration requires the user to have a source material disk, usually like Digital Video Essentials or other types of source media. You can buy them for about 15 bucks at any place that sells TV's. But in this case, we cant pop in a DVD in to a GC, so I ran in to a major problem; How do I calibrate this thing if I cant run source material? I thought about making a case mod for the GC so it would allow me to play normal DVDs but that just seemed too costly to me. So instead, I went on a hunt through my 51 GC games to find source material.

These are in the order that you should be calibrating your television.


FIRST THINGS FIRST:

If your TV has 'Vivid, Enhanced, Standard, Movie' etc settings, use the Movie or Pro mode, as these modes have the most natural picture with the fewest filters and BS that degrades picture quality. You should also know what kind of connection you're using. If the back of your TV has component, S-Video or HDMI inputs - USE THEM! Liksang.com has component, S and HDMI cables for Gamecube on their site. The details of what cable you use are as follows:

R/F: You are getting the worst possible picture quality. Time to upgrade.

composite video: or RCA plus. These are those Red, White and Yellow plugs that came with your GC. These are standard video (yellow) quality, but offer the best audio (red and white) quality.

Component video: These are the more expensive plugs, they have a Red, Blue and Green jack on the end. These are the second best for video quality. if you use these, keep in mind that you'll need to use the component cables for video, and the RCA plugs for your audio, just dont connect the yellow jack. When you use these cables, you can enable a Progressive Scan mode, which disabled interlacing and improves picture quality even further.

HDMI: i'm waiting for confirmation on this, it's on Liksang.com, but i'm not sure if it works on the American region GC. It ships from Japan, which could possibly mean that it only works on the Japanese GC. I'll update when I found out. The thing is though, this plug offers the absolute best video quality. If your TV has this jack, you're in luck; GC games look amazing using this output. It also offers progressive scan mode, or 480p to be exact.

Now for the calibrating:

Brightness: Black level is extremely important, too dark and you ruin everything, too bright and you ruin everything. getting it just right creates a vast improvement in any video source, but man does it really shine on GC. I used Resident Evil here. Pop it in, and in the options menu select 'Adjust Brightness".

Dont play with the contrast here just yet, and do not adjust in the in-game brightness! Doing so will vastly degrade picture performance (it should be at 80). It explains what to do here, basically you want to sit in your normal position from the screen with the lighting in your room you usually use. I play in the dark, so it's lights off. And SMPTE says I should have a 30 degree cone from the screen; For my 51" widescreen RP that meant somewhere around the 8 to 9 foot distance range.

Now that you have that done, set your television brightness so that you cant see ANYTHING below the red line. Now go ahead and start a game.

Contrast: You're in the dining room now, so look around, is it so dark that you cant see anything? Contrast becomes a major player in the GC's video range. Now there's two things to consider here;

1.) Find the peak contrast your television can handle before it blooms, distorts, or changes color from absolute white.

2.) The proper contrast level of the GC.

You wont be able to find out the peak contrast level of your television without a calibration source disk, but you CAN use good judgement. Walk from the dining room in to the zombie hall, but dont activate the cut scene and zombie attack. Instead, take a look at the lamp above you.

Let's set your contrast to MAX. If you're using a direct view television or 'tube television' or basically anything that's not an RP or FP (rear or front projection), you should see the lamp distort like crazy, even changing shape and color. Back off on the contrast until it returns back to its normal shape by going back and forth from ZERO contrast to MAX contrast, once you find the actual point that it changes shape and distorts, set your contrast right beneath it.

Let's check your brightness again, go in to 'Adjust Brightness". Can you see anything below the red line? Can you see even less above the red line? Make your proper brightness adjustments.

Now check out the hallway. You should see almost nothing down the hallway except for the distant lamp and some slight outlines of your character and the walls. Wait for a lightning strike.... how's that for atmosphere? Go ahead and kill the zombie, then enter the main stair hall. You should be able to clearly see the well lit area, look for distortion around the candles, the chandelier, etc. Lower your contrast if you do. Remember that properly calibrated sets have between 5% and 50% and never above when it comes to contrast.

Color & Tint: Now you're probably noticing that the color is way off. Color and tint are two things that give the most trouble when performing a soft calibration (using the on screen menus of your television). Depending on your television, you could have a red push, green push, even a 'fleshtones' push. These are all done to cheat the NTSC standards, by moving the temperature of the television set in to blazing high levels which makes the true color of white more blue. So they add more red to compensate to create more believable flesh tones, or more green to compensate for the additional blue. It makes soft calibrations a nightmare. This step is usually performed using a BLUE FILTER along with source material, such as the THX blue filter glasses ($2 on thx.com). but we're not going to worry about that here. Because you cant use a source other than the GC video games, you're forced to eyeball it, which means it will never be perfect.

However, I found a way to get it pretty damn close. First, we'll do it the obvious: Let's turn your color all the way up. You can still use Resident Evil here, but a brightly colored game (Mario, Wind Waker, Pikmin) will work better imo. Here's what you do, find objects that are RED and BLUE and try to get them on the screen so you can see them both. The brighter the red and blue objects are, the better your results will be. I found things such as the map in Resident Evil which has red and blue doors (to denote locked and unlocked doors) work somewhat well. These aren't 100% colors, but we're eyeballing anyway. Just lower your color setting until the red and blue objects no longer 'bleed', this term is used to describe the point at which a color distorts and seems to bleed outward of the object. You want to get the color setting so the reds and blues stay inside the object and do not look like they're glowing. Find the point where they actually start bleeding and then go right beneath that, that is your MAX setting, do not exceed it. Now from here just take a look around and see if things look right. The wood of the mansion in Resident Evil should look rich and deep with redish wood tones, the candles should have a red and orange tinge that becomes white as it moves outward. As long as you're not bleeding the colors, you should be about perfect.

Tint is harsh as well, another eyeball test. The startup screen for Mario Sunshine uses tons of colors, which is great both for the color and for the tint calibrations. Make the blue look blue, the red look red, if those two colors look natural, you're as close as you can get without professional help. After you adjust tint, check the color again, any bleeding? If so, adjust, and then do tint adjustments again.

Now throw in Resident Evil again if it's not already in there. Go to the brightness adjust screen. You should see NOTHING below the red line. However, the game should not be hard to see at all. If it's too dark to see, adjust your contrast, but dont bloom it out! If you do need to adjust contrast again, check your brightness, color and tint again, as changing any setting will effect the other settings.

Now the final test, and you need good eyes for this one. Sharpness is a feature that is supposed to be dead. It's even in higher end pro-sumer televisions even though it was only invented to add line detail to broadcast television when it was invented. On some TV's, you need a little line enhancement, and I mean little, like 10% max. On some other TV's, it should be turned all the way off. To see what you need, press Y and enter your status screen. We're going to look at a few things: Your ammo counter, the small boxes that display your Defense Weapons (dagger, grenade, tazer, etc) and the words around your health meter and the top catagories, file, map, etc.

First, we'll turn sharpness all the way up. See how it adds lines to everything? This isn't making the picture more detailed, it's actually destroying it. Go down slowly and watch the changes. Go all the way to Zero. If it looks very blurry dont worry, go up one tick at a time. Keep looking at the ammo counter, the small boxes and those words, are they getting 'edgey'? You should litteraly find a pojnt as you increase the sharpness controls where you see added 'noise' around the things I mentioned. Back off until that noise is completely gone, you're getting 100% of the picture quality now.

You're done! Now keep in mind that this setting will look like absolute krap if you switch to TV or movies, the brightness setting is way to low for NTSC standards. The Gamecube cuts off black levels at around 9%, so if you ran a source disk like video essentials you would see that even the 10% black level bars are getting sucked up. If you turn the brightness up to regular levels for TV and movies, then go back to Gamecube, you'll see how horrible it looks, it kills almost all your detail and makes it look like a blanket of fog is over everything.

I'm in the middle of adjusting my 5.1, so i'll post the audio side of things later. What kind of audio systems do you guys have?

HDMI cables for GC? I can't see how they would be necessary. I mean, I know that HDMI is currently the top-end consumer-level patch connection, but I seriously, seriously doubt that the GameCube's output was designed with true digital video signal output in mind, which means that the product being sold almost certainly is converting the base signal to analog and back to digital somewhere along the line, and would that not render HDMI rather impractical?

I don't know... HDMI will carry the signal with the least amount of signal degredation, but typically HDMI cables cost as much as four times what component cables do, and considering that the GameCube isn't designed to take advantage of what HDMI is really about (unconverted, straight digital video and 7.1 channel audio transfer), would the difference be anywhere near worth the extra money? Would there be a difference at all?

And, no DVI interface? It's a step between Component and HDMI, for the curious. Carries digital video on many separate levels, but I think it still has some digital/analog transfer. HDMI is the only completely digital patch cable out there, if memory serves.

Unfortunatly a lot of this seems subject to placebo effect. There's got to be a double blind way to accomplish some of these things.

*puts on engineering cap*

HDMI 1.1 was designed for digital bit strreaming of high definition content, but only for 2-channel audio (red and white audio cables). The standard was changed from 1.1 to 1.3, which now supports 48-bit color palettes and true 5.1 Dolby surround sound.

Earlier models of the GC actually support DVI connectivity, but they removed the feature from later editions of the Gamecube (http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems...nt_faq.jsp)
but if you have one of the first editions of the GC, you should be able to have the GC connected via DVI, which is just another form of HDMI. Might want to look into it. Also, your TV must have the DVI connections in the back in order for it to work.

*takes off engineering cap*

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. :D

Ryan/ Why wouldn't HDMI work on a video game system? There's nothing analog about a DVD player.

DJ/ ......uh, what?

LS/ thank you for repeating what I said. But I assumd everyone here has the older style GC. Isn't it funny though that the Gamecube has HDMI but the PS3 core doesn't?

What DJ meant is a disc meant for such picture calibration for the Gamecube to be optimized for the TV it is being played on. I'm sure it exists out there somewhere (why else would you have the kiosks in the first place with the nice monitors?).

Also, just to clarify, DVI is NOT the same as HDMI: it was an earlier standad before the formal introduction of HDMI to adhere to the HD standard (which is admittedly more confusing than a hermaphrodite).

Yeah but atleast with a hermaphrodite you know what you're getting. :D

DVI is HDMI like Spaghettios or Spaghettios with meatballs. It's the same thing but one is better. Most TVs with an HDMI input double as a DVI input since the plugs are the same.

As far as a calibration disk for GC I know the developers have them and Nintendo must make them somewhere but there's most likely no way for a consumer to nab one. I think i'll email Nintendo about it.

Audio

There's no way I can get in to everything here. If you dont have a source disk with limited band pink noise and a dB meter then you're not going to get it perfect but we can atleast make it sound better.

First of all, let's look at the settings on your reciever:

CROSS OVER: This entire depends on your speaker size., but as a general rule of thumb, the smaller your speakers the higher the cross over frequency. I have 6 inch (measured circumfrence) of the main loudspeaker portion of my speakers, they're all the same size so it's easy to find cross at 150. Sending almost all the low bass information to my sub. Never, ever, ever use zero cross (large speaker setting), this means your sub gets zero information and unless your speakers have individual subwoofers your audio will be krap.

SPEAKER SIZE: Always put them on small, even if you have 5 foot tower speakers. This way you can direct low bass information to your subwoofer. Sticking somewhere between your cross of 100 to 150 is usually the best choice.

LFE DYNAMIC VOLUME: This can be called different things on your system, like LFE attenuator etc. But make sure this is off, this basically lowers the volume of LFE information in the case of distortion during dolby pro logic playback (which has no LFE information), which will cut down your subwoofer output. If your volume levels are atleast reasonable this wont be an issue.

DYNAMIC RANGE CRUSH: this is called different things, but you usually have 3 choices, off, mid, or max. Always leave this off. What it does is compress the entire dynamic range of the audio so that soft sounds and loud sounds are percieved at the same volume level. This is horrible for any media, video games especially. Off off off.

BASS BOOST, EQUALIZER SETTINGS: Any option that says bass booster needs to be off, it actually adds distortion to whatever you're listening too. Your sub will make sure you get correct bass response. Equalizer settings for each speaker can be a huge improvement if you have a sound level meter. If you dont, put your equalizer settings to normal, off, or default. If some of your speakers actually sound they're getting more higher or lower frequencies than other speakers, you need a sound level meter.

INTERNAL TEST SIGNALS: No no no. Beyond letting you know that the speaker is recieving signal, these are worthless. Never use internal test signals from your reciever to adjust proper volume levels.

Now for placement and setup.

A common misconception is that 5.1 has rear channels. It doesn't. The 'rear' speakers in a 5.1 are directional that fire sound energy directly at the audience. In a movie theater the rear channels are dipolar which fires sound energy everywhere in the back, so you cant pinpoint the location. It's great for letting dozens of people hear the same thing in every seat, but this method is horrible for a living room. So put your rear speakers at ear hight or slightly above, and to the sides so that they're pointing directly at your ears where you sit. The mains (L R) should also be at ear hight and pointed directly at the listener. A good measure is to look at your couch and where the rear channels are placed. Try to set up your mains that they form a square around your living room and lined up with the rear speakers. Lastly the center speaker should ideally be at ear hight though this is usually an issue since it has to be in the center where the TV is, directly above or directly below the TV. find what works best for you. If it's directly above, put a wad of tissues with double sided tape under the speaker so that you can angle it down to fire directly at the listener. if it's below the TV, do the same to aim it up.

Now you should have a perfect square of speakers. The rear channels should be at your sides, and all speakers should be firing directly at you. The next step is distance, just measure the length from each speaker to the listener and input it in to the recievers data. You should find an option called distance where you can do this. This tells the reciever how close the speakers are so that when adjusting master volume levels it compensates for the other speakers, meaning that are settings for each speaker will stay consistent through low to high master volume levels. Though it's important to find the best volume level and keep it there, use mute if you get a phone call or whatever. The master volume, wants calibrated, shouldn't be moved unless you change the source material - ie: dolby pro logic material, to DTS encoded material. Each form offers its own unique characteristics and should be calibrated seperately, but we're messing with dolby pro logic for our GCs.

Now the subwoofer. Dear god the subwoofer. Low bass information is nondirectional, you can put it anywhere in the room and you wont be able to detect where it's coming from. BUT, the room acoustics will play a huge role. Putting your subwoofer against a wall or corner will make your bass boomier but will lessen the quality, making it distorted. Ideally the subwoofer should be in the middle of the room with no obstructions but this is usually not a good option for people in a living room. So first, find its home where it's out of the way. Is anything next to it? Have someone sit on the couch and play something that has bass information, move the obstruction from the sub, did you hear a change in the bass? Try this out until you find a location that has clear bass with minimal obstruction and no corners. Also, the sub should never be on a table or shelt a this will act like a sound board and distort your bass.

WIRING: This can be tricky, sometimes the back of your speakers will have black and white connectors or black and red connectors, but your wires dont have matching colors. if this is the case, throw out your old wire and buy wires with matching colors. Wires are cheap and sold by the foot so you can get the exact amount you need. Match up everything, black to black, red to red. This crucial step can mean the difference between great audio and horrible audio as the phase shifting, if off, can destroy your sound field. If you have connectors where you have to strip the wire bald and pop it in a connector with a clamp, try not to leave any bald wire hanging out, as this is where information will be lost before getting to the speaker. Strip the wire, then clamp it in, if anything sticks out, cut the bare wire a little until it's all in there.

Now we're wired correctly. You should have all speakers going through the subwoofer. If your sub doesnt have inputs for speakers, dont worry - The reciever should be able to direct bass on its own. Though its always best to wire through the subwoofer.

Now, if we had a dB meter (40 bucks at radio shack) this would be alot easier. But we'll use God's dB meter for now. Go ahead and throw in Metroid Prime 1. Start a game, and in the options make sure it's set to surround sound and the music is off (sound FX should be at 100%). Let's head to Magmoor. What we're looking for is one of those huge creatures that become platforms when you shoot them. If you dont shoot them, when they open their mouths and shut them, they spit lava. Its audio range is pretty broad, so it works great.

Walk up to the creature, you should be recieving low bass information from the mains and center. Now turn around so that the creature is directly behind you and walk forward. What we're looking for is the sound of the creature from the rear speakers only. keep moving forward until the mains and center no longer have the sound of the creature but your rears do. By now you're probably noticing that the rears have no bass information, this is a known issue with dolby pro logic. There's a work-around, but more on that later.

Turn around and face the creature, lower the volume of each speaker, center, rears and sub. Then set your master volume to an appropriate level. It's a pretty big animal so it should be loud but not deafening, you should be able to hear every nuance in its sound effects. Your center, rears and sub should be at their lowest setting. Now get some tape, any tape will do. Tape down the control stick so that Samus goes in a circle at a fixed point. She should rotate quickly, and you should hear the creature rotating audibly around you. notice how it gets loud when you face the creature and then dies off as it goes around you? We're going to fix that, start with your rears, slowly bring their volume level up until it matches the volume level of the mains. It should be seemless with no noticable drop in volume from back to front. Now you'll notice that the center goes a little dead during Samus's spin, so bring it up until you can clearly hear that the volume gets louder from the center speaker, then lower it until its equal to the other speakers. The creature's souinds should rotate around you with no drop or rise in volume.

Now your sub. People always crank their sub and destroy the sound field, this is a major no-no. It's for low bass information, not to add bass to the sound. Let's go to Phendrana. You want to find the Pirate's Phendrana base, inside there is a room with a hologram of the galaxy you're in. By the top of the room are two 'pumps' that make awesome bass. First, turn the subwoofer off, if you dont have that option, set all your speakers to large (which will remove all low bass information). Notice the volume level of the pumps, you should hear no low bass. Turn the sub back on, you should already hear some bass even though it's still on its lowest setting. What we want to do is increase the volume of the bass until it matches the volume of the pumps coming out of the speakers, but not beyond it. This also works in Majora's Mask, go to the bank in Clock Town and talk to the woman, tell her you want to deposit rupees and she'll slap her hands on her knees. Bring up the sub volume until it matches the volume of the speakers. You can hear when it goes over, it becomes way too thumpy.

The rear channel sub work-around.

Keep in mind that this is a very bad choice for anything not being played in dolby pro logic. If you watch a movie in DTS or dolby digital with the rear sub on, you will get horrible sound. The reason is because in true surround modes, the rears send their low bass information to the one subwoofer along with the other speakers, so you'd be doubling up your bass. It's true that adding up to 4 subwoofers in your set up can offer the best bass response but you will need a professional to help you with it. This patch-through we're going to do is absolutely no good for true 5.1, 6.1 or 7.1, but awesome for pro logic material, which is all the GC does.

First you'll need a second subwoofer. You want to patch from the rears OUT (on the reciever or the main sub) to the second sub, then from the second sub to your rear speakers. This is going to allow the sub to catch low bass information before it gets to your speakers, giving you low bass information for your rear. If your reciever allows it, in this setup setting the rear speakers to LARGE while keeping your mains and center on small will offer the best rear bass reproduction. if your system doesn't allow it, it'll still sound much better. Go to that room with the pumps in Phendrana and tape your controller down again so that you rotate in front of the pumps, Set your rear sub to the same volume level as the main sub. be sure to set the appropriate cross frequency as well, which should be 150 usually. Now, if your sub has a phase button, you basically want to look at each phase and hear the difference, what you want is so that the bass becomes disperssed and not localized. Do this for your main sub if it has a phase button as well.

Now kill some enemies and walk around, too loud? too soft? Just lower the master volume or raise the master volume, with all your settings as they are, it should match at any volume level. Play it softly, then go to Magmoor again, is that creature still at the same volume level across all speakers? he should be, but if not, then it means your system needs to be closer to that original volume level that we worked out.

For the absolute best setup for GC, I reccomend two subs one in the front, one in the rear. Your speakers should be the ones that were meant to be used on your reciever. Mixing speakers up, like Sanyo center and Bose rears will make your sound system sound like total krap. Always use the same speaker set across all speakers, including your two subs. if you cant find a stand-alone sub from the same manufacturer as your main sub, just look at its tech specs and wattage, you should find one that matches. For those of your with a sound meter, and a source disk with limited pink band noise, do the following.

1.) After placement and wiring, set all speakers to their lowest setting.

2.) Set your reciever to DOLBY PRO LOGIC ENCODING for the limited pink band noise. This way we know we're getting the correct volume levels for dolby pro logic.

3.) Set your sound meter to C WEIGHTING and SLOW RESPONSE. bring up the master volume until you reach 75 on the sound meter. It should be steady on the needle. Now bring all your speakers, including sub, to 75 on the meter. During the limited pink band noise circulation you should have a steady needle on 75 across all of them. These are your master settings, NEVER MOVE THEM. This means if your master volume is at 39, it should never move beyond or below 39.

Note: if you cant get the sub to match 75, or at 75 it sounds like its cutting off some bass information, you might need to alter the cross frequency. Remember that the smaller the speakers, the higher the cross frequency, but you really shouldn't go beyond the 150 mark unless you have incredibly small bookshelf speakers that are under 6 inches in diameter on the main loud speaker of the speakers.

Enjoy! Even without the sound meter if you followed my steps you should be close to proper volume levels and have great audio. Remember though that these settings are only for GC and not for movies encoded in DTS or dolby digital. Especially the use of a rear sub, which should be turned off during DTS or dolby digital material. If your movie has the option for dolby pro logic audio, your settings for GC will work great here. But if you have the option of DTS, why would you want anything less? :D

*note that calibrating for other sources such as your DVD player requires the same steps. Just pop in your pink noise and set the proper levels through the meter.

my next post will deal with tweaks and calibration of a rear projection television! Does anyone here have one of these monsters?

Just to update, I called Nintendo, DNH services (the distributors of the demo kiosks) and a local store and was unable to find any kind of calibration disk. In fact they said such a disk does not exist, which I dont believe for a second. I'm going to call a developer and see what I can find there.