Plasma

[Sean Oneil]

You haven’t provided enough information for anyone to really help you, and I apologize, but some of what you said doesn’t make any sense. You’re connecting the plasma to the Mac’s DVI output. So why would a capture card have anything to do with it? And are you saying you have a Kona and a Decklink installed on the same machine?

Anyways, I’ll take a guess at what you’re trying to do. You want the Mac to scale your video to 1280×768, so you can achieve “1:1” pixel mapping without any black bars.

If this is what you’re trying to do, then you’re going about it all wrong. Please provide more info and I can help you out.

Sean

[Sean Oneil]

[Bear Baker] “However, when the image plays out the monitor vertically squeezes the image down to a 16:9 frame during playback.”

Ok, I think I understand what’s going on. This is very complicated stuff.

Final cut pro is not going to scale your video to 15:9 during playback, and for good reasons. Using Cinema Desktop mode, it will add black lines to fill the resolution while maintaining the proper aspect ratio (16:9). So if the computer’s resolution is 1280×768, Final Cut will add the extra 48 lines of black to maintain a proper image size.

Basically, you can either have a 1:1 centered output with black bars making up the difference, or you can have your monitor scale it to fill the screen. You can’t have both. Just like you can’t get a suntan in the middle of the night.

To make matters worse, your not going to get your monitor to do what you want if it think you’re looking at a computer desktop instead of video.

There’s a DVI handshake involved. Basically, the Mac is telling the plasma “Hey, I’m computer, not a DVD player”. It thinks that because… it is a computer. Imagine that? The plasma has been designed to react accordingly when it sees this and performs “underscan correction”. That way, you can see the Apple menu and all your desktop icons – they won’t be hidden in the overscan area. However, you certainly don’t want this when playing back video.

So in case you didn’t figure it out, you don’t want your plasma acting as a computer monitor. Even if you change your resolution to 1280×720, the plasma is still going to act as a computer monitor and you won’t get a true 720p playback.

What you want is the HDLink by Blackmagic (or a similar product). This way you will be feeding it a REAL video signal (not a computer signal) and your TV will treat it as such. You won’t have nasty underscan scaling, and the plasma should do a centered output of 720p so you’ll get 1:1 pixel mapping (meaning that the plasma does not perform any scaling). There will be a very thin black line on the top and bottom – but since it’s so small you won’t even see it because it will reside in the overscan area.

If none of this makes sense, I’d hire a professional installer familiar with pro video equipment.

Sean

[Bear Baker]

Sean,
I appreciate your input. With or with out the condescending, ineffective analogies. The capture card’s codec is responsible for video output even if the output is through the Macs main DVI port. This surprised me as much as you when I heard it. But I have heard it from 2 people. One with over 20 years experience in Video editing, the other a “professional installer familiar with pro video equipment” you suggested I employ. I have enough (15+ years) experience in the business to believe and understand them. If the image is at rest it is not video… it is simply an image that is being piped through the DVI port. When the image is played out and is now video the computer is instructed to rely on the codecs supplied by FCP/AJA/BMD for formatting the output.

I am aware of the 48 scan line squeeze to force the output to 16:9 issue. My codec’s do not support 15:9. My sequence is 15:9. My monitor is 15:9. If the monitor displays the sequence in 16:9, it is not a 1:1 ratio.

So one of my questions to anyone out there should be:
Is there a codec out there for FCP that allows for 15:9 output/display?

The monitor is not scaling the image, the codecs from AJA and BMD are squeezing the image output during playback. FYI my client had previously purchased a Standard Def iO box, and very recently purchased DeckLink HD card.

The plasma monitor has a Dot By Dot setting that allows for a 1:1 output when connected to a computer via its DVI port. When we set the monitor setting in display preferences to the monitors native resolution 1280×768 we get a pillar box; vertical Gray filler to the left and right of the image–not 24 black lines on top and 24 black lines on the bottom. We get this in any operation of the Mac (i.e. Finder, Safari, etc.) My hope is that if we can get this part of the chain to work properly, that the rest will fall into place. I think the odds are long, but it goes back to the question asked above.

When we set the output to 1280×1024 the computers output it fills the screen. The plasma’s Dot by Dot setting is then not allowed as the signal is too large. So we set it to Partial. Which to me implies cropping. But it is either scaling or cropping.

The reason it is so important to fill the screen completely is that the project we are working on is a gallery of 50″ plasma screens displaying 35-mm filmed scenes. Great care has been taken to make this stuff look as good as possible. The director wants the screen to be filled, without the monitor scaling the image to achieve this. The “professional installer familiar with pro video equipment” that was hired to do the actual install is trying as hard as I am to find the answer. He is playing the image off of PC servers to 9 screens some of the set in 3’s vertically placed side by side to display on huge image. Both of us have some doubts we will be successfully in filling the screen at 1:1, but we still want to try everything we can to do just that. Hence, these posts.

[Gunleik Groven]

Have you tried over at Corporate video? (With this last explanation)

I think I’ve seen subjects like this over there.

I guess this is sorta what you want to achieve:

https://www.digitaltigers.com/index.shtml

You could ask over there…

Gunleik

[Bear Baker]

This is close to what the end distribution/display will be in the gallery and I will pass along the link to the installer. If it’s not exactly what we need maybe it will jog is brain in a direction that would help. The trick is that the monitors we are to use have already been ordered/purchased. Pioneer PDP 505CMX 50″ plasmas. I am following the installers lead for testing our procedure. At this point I don’t think there is a good shot at changing the displays to be used.

Thanks,
Bear Baker

[David Jones]

Where did you come up with 15×9?

By the way, the monitor you mentioned, the Pioneer PDP 505CMX 50″ plasma is native 16×9.

[Sean Oneil]

I was trying to help, not be condecending. I don’t exactly have a copy of your resume here. And I didn’t know you already hired someone.

There is a handshake between a DVI source and DVI display that you’re not understanding here. This is not an insult. Very few people understand it. I hardly understand it myself. So what is happening is that it seems your plasma thinks a computer signal must always be displayed at 4:3 so it is adding the pillarbox. But this sounds a problem with your display’s EDID – it is most likely not the Mac’s problem. I really don’t know. More info would be helpful. What happens when you plug it into a Windows PC? Does it do the same thing?

If I had your same model plasma, I’d be able to tell you more. Unfortunately you’ll be lucky if anyone here has the same one and knows about this stuff. Even though I don’t have it, I’d bet a lot of money that if you get an HDLink and feed the monitor a true 720p video signal (not a computer signal), it will map the image on the center of the grid, also called “centered output”. The excess 48 lines is so thin, they will be hidden within the overscan range. So you won’t see it. This way, you will be filling the entire screen AND there will be no scaling involved by either the monitor or the computer.

Scaling it to 15:9 in FCP is not a good way to go about it whatsoever. Even if it works, it’s still not the right way to do it. If you have no other choice but to plug the monitor directly into the Mac’s DVI, then you’re probably out of luck. You may wish to try something like SwitchRes (do a Google search). It may be able to change the DVI signal so that your monitor thinks it’s 720p video instead of a 4:3 computer desktop. If that does work, you want to set Final Cut to 720p, not change it to 15:9 because your monitor almost certainly handles 720p properly.

[Bear Baker]

The plasma will display 16:9. The plasma native resolution is 1280×768. If you do the math you find that 16:9 would be the normal 1280×720 as in 720p. in other words divide 1280 by 16, then times that number (80) by 9 and you get 720. If you divide 768 by 9 you get 85.3333…. If you divide 1280 by this number you’ll get 15. I have a 30″ sharp aquos at home. It has the same thing. If you play out a 16:9 image at 1:1 you get black filler (too thin really to call a letterbox) in theory this is 24 lines on top and 24 lines on bottom 24+24=48 the number you get when you subtract 720 from 768.

Thanks for asking,
Bear

[Bear Baker]

I misunderstood, and thought you were talking about why the image would be full screen while idle and crunch down to 16:9 during playout with regards to the handshake thing. The handshake thing acutually makes more sense with the pillar box in the 1280×768 to dod by dot setting. I have been out and plan on calling Pioneer tomorrow. As far as “scaling to 15:9” we are actually cut a 768 out of a 1080 picture keeping the picture 1:1. If we run into any issues with composition and need to resize (down only then we would use either After Effects or Shake as I was told today that the scaling processing is better in those programs. This whole project has a lot of new territory R&D for those of us working on it. We have been told a lot of stuff that doesn’t jive with what we are finding out on our own. We are testing everything. Thanks for the post I’ll run it by Pioneer.

Bear

[Bear Baker]

I’d like to thank you guys for trying. If I don’t respond anymore please forgive me.

Bear