2nd September 2006, 11:13 AM
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?
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?