JVC Autocal Software V12 calibration for 2019 RS1000/RS2000/RS3000/NX5/NX7/NX9

[JvcNativeLCOS]

Just bought the efi es2000 meter. Do I install x rites i1pro 2 drivers or does the es2000 have its own driver?

Sorry I know dumb question.

[JvcNativeLCOS]

Just bought the efi es2000 meter. Do I install x rites i1pro 2 drivers or does the es2000 have its own driver?

Sorry I know dumb question.

Nevermind. Figured it out. I just downloaded the x-rite i1Diagnostics tool and it did it for me. 

[Picree]

Just bought an EFI ES200 meter on ebay to use with AutoCal.  If I gently shake it there is a rattle sound.  Can anyone please confirm if this is normal?  Does anyone else's make a rattle noise?  Sounds like a shutter.

It looks brand new and passes all diagnostics but iDiagnostics reports 8,877 lamp burn seconds.  Is that high?

[kryonas]

Hi all,

Followed Manni's fantastic instructions to autocal my NX7. Used a spyderX for gamma (quality mode) and an ipro 2 for color, and performed calibrations for 709 and 2020. After reviewing the results I have run into a couple of issues with my 709 results that I'm trying to address and am unsure about.

1) greyscale balance is great at 50%+ but readings at lower than that have significant color temp drift which gets more extreme as luminance decreases. This issue I believe can be addressed by performing a manual gamma calibration through the autocal software

2) the peak points of my gamut readings match the expected 709 space exactly, they're spot on, but running a multi-point test for the gamut revealed substantially higher saturation than expected for my 80, 60, 40, 20% saturation points, with the error being uniform across all colors. This issue I'm having difficulty with. If I decrease the saturation through the color profile menu, I end up getting a gamut that is significantly smaller than the 709 space at 100%, but with accurate measurements with saturations below that. Is there any way to resolve this that you know of?

Thanks for taking the time to read this and for any help you can offer  

[Picree]

Success depends upon many details. Some not yet mentioned. In general I would say, for the greyscale with the Spider X make sure it is well positioned (it has a 3.4” diameter target at 12” distance) then zoom in the image as far as possible with the projector to maximize the light. Also make sure the iris is open all the way to get the most light. I think I had to have 225 nits on 100% white to get good readings down at 10 ire. Also try doing a normal instead of quality calibration first to see if that works. Start simple.

No comment on the saturation issue other than the color cal has to be done at the iris setting you think will give about 65 nits post-color calibration.

I have done mostly the same as you. My opinion?  After a well done AutoCal there should be very little touch up on either gamma or gamut. If you need a lot of touch up after autocal it may be a bad autocal. Of course I am ignoring obvious issues with the equipment and assume the setup is sound.

In my case a Color Autocal with an i1Pro2 actually increased overall brightness a bit. If you get weird results consider reloading the init file and starting over.

[kryonas]

Success depends upon many details. Some not yet mentioned. In general I would say, for the greyscale with the Spider X make sure it is well positioned (it has a 3.4” diameter target at 12” distance) then zoom in the image as far as possible with the projector to maximize the light. Also make sure the iris is open all the way to get the most light. I think I had to have 225 nits on 100% white to get good readings down at 10 ire. Also try doing a normal instead of quality calibration first to see if that works. Start simple.

No comment on the saturation issue other than the color cal has to be done at the iris setting you think will give about 65 nits post-color calibration.

I have done mostly the same as you. My opinion?  After a well done AutoCal there should be very little touch up on either gamma or gamut. If you need a lot of touch up after autocal it may be a bad autocal. Of course I am ignoring obvious issues with the equipment and assume the setup is sound.

In my case a Color Autocal with an i1Pro2 actually increased overall brightness a bit. If you get weird results consider reloading the init file and starting over.

Thank you very much for the thoughtful reply. I'll do as you suggested and try zooming in (I'm assuming by "zoom in" here you mean to make the resulting image smaller, since you said this was to increase brightness) and rerun my gamma calibrations, both normal and quality.

Worst case, I restore the init like you also suggested and try again. Unfortunately I only have access to the i1pro2 and the spyderx so if there is a significant problem with one of them there's no way I can think of to determine which equipment is at fault. I'm basing my greyscale conclusions on the readings of the i1pro2 in both the autocal color results and post calibration readings with CALMAN. Of course, I've also read that the i1pro2 performs very poorly with low brightness (hence using spyderx for gamma), so it could be that the greyscale is fine and the i1pro2 is faulty. Which would be unfortunate, since it is a rather expensive bit of gear that I bought solely for the purpose of calibrating my nx7.

One thing that was interesting to me was that on my gamma runs, the first reading for each color came up 0. Before my nx7 I had an rs910u and, even though it's been quite a while, I do distinctly remember being able to get a positive value for the first read. So you may be right that I simply need to intensify the image by decreasing its size. 

My first round of calibrations were already done on high lamp power with a fully open (on 0) manual iris. I suppose it's also possible that the bulb that came with the projector is just no good and darker than it should be which could mess with the calibration.

I'll report the results for the re-run of the gamma with your recommendations. Here's hoping it also somehow fixes the color issue too. If anyone has any further recommendations for either issue I'd love to hear them.

Thanks again!

[Picree]

From my limited experience first reading at 0 really throws things off. So, yeah making the image small as possible (and brightest) will likely help gamma/grayscale. I would also leave it zoomed when working on gamma outside of AutoCal (Calman). I get more consistent results that way. Don’t be tempted to move the spyder close to the screen to “see more brightness” as that makes the viewing window smaller and has been less consistent for me. Stick to 12”ish. The spyder may fall just out of the right side of the AutoCal orange box but - I just went with it. My zoomed nits at 100% white was like 225.

Nits for 100% white SDR should target 65 post cal (unzoomed of course). That should require an iris reduction of some amount. Nits for HDR for me is about 110-120 iris at zero. So if you are in those ballparks it likely the bulb is ok. Could be something else though.

As far as the meters you could measure and write down RGBW values for both then plot them. They will probably be pretty close. That might give confidence the meters are fine. Others would probably recommend you eventually calibrate the spyder against the i1pro2.  I’ve compared a six yr old quite used i1Pro2 against an unused 4 yr old i1Pro2 against a 3 yr old i1D3 and all three were all so close on the primaries I couldnt figure out why I would need to correct the i1D3. Maybe I’m just lucky but they seem to generally be reliable. 

[kryonas]

From my limited experience first reading at 0 really throws things off. So, yeah making the image small as possible (and brightest) will likely help gamma/grayscale. I would also leave it zoomed when working on gamma outside of AutoCal (Calman). I get more consistent results that way. Don’t be tempted to move the spyder close to the screen to “see more brightness” as that makes the viewing window smaller and has been less consistent for me. Stick to 12”ish. The spyder may fall just out of the right side of the AutoCal orange box but - I just went with it. My zoomed nits at 100% white was like 225.

Nits for 100% white SDR should target 65 post cal (unzoomed of course). That should require an iris reduction of some amount. Nits for HDR for me is about 110-120 iris at zero. So if you are in those ballparks it likely the bulb is ok. Could be something else though.

As far as the meters you could measure and write down RGBW values for both then plot them. They will probably be pretty close. That might give confidence the meters are fine. Others would probably recommend you eventually calibrate the spyder against the i1pro2.  I’ve compared a six yr old quite used i1Pro2 against an unused 4 yr old i1Pro2 against a 3 yr old i1D3 and all three were all so close on the primaries I couldnt figure out why I would need to correct the i1D3. Maybe I’m just lucky but they seem to generally be reliable.

Couple of updates here:

1. I found out that the saturation issue was because I had the "color" setting turned up to 21 somehow so that was purely me being an idiot. I don't remember ever setting color to any value so I'm kind of at a loss as to how this happened
2. I figured out (somewhat) what was going on with my greyscale color temps. Neither the spyder x nor the ipro were giving inaccurate readings. Instead, it seems that doing the gamma and color profiling in 2 steps, first gamma with spyderx and then color with ipro, was causing the calibration software to produce very bad results. The spyderx would perfectly calibrate gamma, with good color temps and then the color profiling step would totally botch those altering them significantly after the color profiling. Discovered this after closely watching the pre-calibration log values during color profiling. I tried the calibration again with color+gamma on the ipro and this did not produce the same error (although the calibration results were not as good doing it all in one step). So I'm not really sure how to proceed from here. Any thoughts on this?

[Sunny44]

Hi,

I have done a calibration using the spyderX for both gamma and color on my rs1000. I just bought a efi es2000 meter, I’m wondering if I need to restore the INIT backup file before doing another calibration or can I just do the calibration using the spyderX for gamma and the es2000 for color?
Thanks

[Picree]

Couple of updates here:

1. I found out that the saturation issue was because I had the "color" setting turned up to 21 somehow so that was purely me being an idiot. I don't remember ever setting color to any value so I'm kind of at a loss as to how this happened
2. I figured out (somewhat) what was going on with my greyscale color temps. Neither the spyder x nor the ipro were giving inaccurate readings. Instead, it seems that doing the gamma and color profiling in 2 steps, first gamma with spyderx and then color with ipro, was causing the calibration software to produce very bad results. The spyderx would perfectly calibrate gamma, with good color temps and then the color profiling step would totally botch those altering them significantly after the color profiling. Discovered this after closely watching the pre-calibration log values during color profiling. I tried the calibration again with color+gamma on the ipro and this did not produce the same error (although the calibration results were not as good doing it all in one step). So I'm not really sure how to proceed from here. Any thoughts on this?

Couple things come to mind. When doing color make sure to set zoom and iris to whatever you will have the JVC at when watching. Consider checking one meter against the other by measuring an RGBW set. It may be helpful to plot them on top of each other for visual confirmation. If both meters are close to each other then it is something in the setup or meter positioning (my opinion). Run a log only with each meter and compare. Changing the iris affected the grayscale for me as wel but only a tiny bit. I used the gains/offsets in the JVC to compensate (only one or two clicks for each color) for the iris change then touched it up which ChromaPure (or whatever you use). 

Keep the i1Pro a reasonable distance (like 1-2’) away from the screen even if it is outside the orange box. I found that too close can mess things up. 

If you do gamma and color with the same meter it is best to run a gamma only (with zoom, no iris) followed by a color only (no zoom, with iris). I assume that is what you did. 

[Picree]

Hi,

I have done a calibration using the spyderX for both gamma and color on my rs1000. I just bought a efi es2000 meter, I’m wondering if I need to restore the INIT backup file before doing another calibration or can I just do the calibration using the spyderX for gamma and the es2000 for color?
Thanks

I only restored the init file if something looked really messed up. But in general, for routine calibration I don’t think you have to blow it away with the init file every time. For the same settings the software should overwrite the settings that were there.

One comment in reply to both of the above posts. Before calibration, from the JVC menu make sure to “Reset” the CMS rather than manually putting all settings back to zero. It has been mentioned that the Reset can clear out hidden legacy adjustments that may reside in the JVC but not obvious on the GUI. 

And - remember, during JVC calibration the software ignores any gains/offsets but then during the final confirmation it does apply those so while the calibration may have gone well the actual results look bad. 

Sorry if comments are not complete but I am typing this out on my phone. 

[Bloodta]

Is there a way to do a manual calibration of the grayscale in HDR using the gamma editor in autocal. 

[SupNA]

Hi newbie here,

Just want to clarify I understand the full calibration process correctly. With the manni's autocal guide and the Calibration for dummies (quite old guide though) on the other forum, my understanding is that:

1. I will run the JVC autocal as the first step, autocal test patterns are from the projector internal generator and settings are stored on the projector after the autocal, and applied to both HDMI sockets. - This is to ensure JVC responses to the signal correctly and gamma curves are all good.

2. Then with my BD/media players, OPPO and Zidoo, to separately play brightness and contract patterns ( I use AVCHD and Mechanic HDR10) to set black level and white clipping correctly. - This is to eliminate external source difference?

3. Is there a need to further fine tune the calibration by playing test patterns from OPPO/Zidoo and manually change the settings with HCFR measurements? Does the HDMI output from different devices vary a lot?

Any input and comments are much appreciated.

[David Vaughn]

Hi newbie here,

Just want to clarify I understand the full calibration process correctly. With the manni's autocal guide and the Calibration for dummies (quite old guide though) on the other forum, my understanding is that:

1. I will run the JVC autocal as the first step, autocal test patterns are from the projector internal generator and settings are stored on the projector after the autocal, and applied to both HDMI sockets. - This is to ensure JVC responses to the signal correctly and gamma curves are all good.

2. Then with my BD/media players, OPPO and Zidoo, to separately play brightness and contract patterns ( I use AVCHD and Mechanic HDR10) to set black level and white clipping correctly. - This is to eliminate external source difference?

3. Is there a need to further fine tune the calibration by playing test patterns from OPPO/Zidoo and manually change the settings with HCFR measurements? Does the HDMI output from different devices vary a lot?

Any input and comments are much appreciated.

You are correct. You can use HCFR if you'd like to make minor adjustments but in a lot of cases, it isn't necessary. 

[SupNA]

Great, I will then just focus on getting the autocal done correctly