Digital Video Essentials - HD Basics [Blu-ray] [2008]

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Starring: ~ Sam Dalton,
List Price: £19.99

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Product Details:

Studio: DVD International

Number of Discs: 1

Format: Colour, Dolby PAL Widescreen

Rating:

Sales Rank: 3790

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Customer Reviews:

Too much to reach the sweet spot, however, a must buy! (22 November 2008)
Hi, i bought this disc to improve the quality of picture of my scarlet LG 47", using my sony bdp-s550. the disc if full of details and info about the HDTVs and the history of of the industry...etc, and it took me too much to find the real calibration section. when i found it, the result was as good as i expected. my advice is to go directly to the HD calibration section, and to know from the begining that your display will not be as shiny as "Game" or "VIVID" presets, however, it will give you the true output.

Not enough gain for this much pain... (08 October 2008)
This is what happens when you let TV nerds make an instructional video.
It could have been rescued by some decent post-production, but sadly they've left that to fellow nerds too.
Less time spent criticizing the TV manufacturers for not adhering to the correct standards and more time on how to get a decent picture and it might actually be of some use.

The introduction to HD is laborious to say the least, and all the worse for being delivered by that bloke you avoid at parties.
Considering it's aimed at non TV engineers, it delivers far too much needless technical detail whilst dropping in important technical terms that it's not bothered to explain. This really should have been picked up in production.
Sadly in amongst all the clutter it does contain some genuinely useful advice, but you'll have skipped to the next chapter by then.

The setting up my HDTV section is what you'll have bought it for, and this is just as poor as the previous chapter.
Instead of the test card explanation being delivered succinctly and to the point, it throws in far too much unnecessary technical waffle which is confusing and means you've forgotten the original explanation when the test card appears. That's if you understood it in the first place.
It also has a habit of wondering off into details about projectors, which really should have been put into a separate section.
To further demonstrate its poor production values the video displays a pause signal when the test cards displayed so that you can take the time to calibrate the TV before it moves on. Sadly the narrator carries on talking over the top so you wait expecting a delay, but as soon as he's done then the test card disappears and you have to wind it back.

The final section "Just the Test Patterns" is just as woeful.
Each pattern carries an explanation of what it does but a dire description of how to use it which probably only makes sense to TV engineers.

After watching this dross I can't help but think that what the author is really trying to say is "Look at us, we're TV engineers and we know all this stuff, aren't we clever!"

And the TV doesn't look much better for it either...

Have a Gun next to you.... (23 September 2008)
After playing this Blu Ray it's almost left me suicidal, It's so long winded and that boring voice rabbitting on.... I needed a gun.

Eventually when I did the set up, I went back to my old set up which look much better.

Avoid this if can. Try one of them THX certified dvds disc instead like Star Wars etc.

Great, but... (04 September 2008)
This is a great start for anyone with a new HDTV or AV set up who really want the best out of it. But be warned there is a lengthy and rather poorly explained introduction. This goes straight into quite a complex explanation of the origins of audio visual standards and the fact that no TV (or very few) is truly correct. Having said that I did learn quite a lot, but I imagine few would sit through the rather monotone monologue.

The test cards are very good, but for this money it seems rather overpriced, since you can down load or create various test cards yourself.

In short this is a quick way to set up your system, but it can mostly be done for little outlay by searching on the internet if you are prepared to look around.

Does the job, but not easy to follow (13 August 2008)
I purchased this blu-ray to setup a new hd tv I had purchased as I wanted to get the best out of it that I could. There is a lot of background information to do with HD and various standards, which did bore me within the first 15 minutes. So I skipped straight to the calibration section.

This section is really what you buy this disc for and so I was a little dissapointed to find the narrator taking forever to explain how to use the test screens, when really it can be explained within a few sentences. Even then, the explanation is not crystal clear and led to some confusion when calibrating my screen, meaning I would have to go back and listen again in detail to what the narrator is saying word for word. This could lead to people miscalibrating their screens, and left me a bit miffed when I was left with a dull blue-tinted screen the first time i tried it.

Once you get used to the narrator and manage get what you need to know from the excessive explanations, you will get better results. I found myself using the test screens on their own once I figured out what I was supposed to do with them.

It did take a fair bit of trial and error to get a result I was happy with as the test patterns do show the shortcommings of my tv, which means having to compromise with some calibrations. The narrator gives the impression that this is a common problem however, and that most users will face these problems as manufacturers fail to make tv's which adhere to various standards needed to reproduce a reliable image.

Overall I am pleased to have purchased this disc, knowing that I am getting much better picture quality from my new tv. For those of you that want to get the most from your own HDTV this is an essential purchase.