How do I adjust brightness/contrast...

[jbuszkie]

I'm looking for a way to adjust the brightness and contrast etc..
of the playback. I can temporarily set them with ATI's overlay
adjustments but Sage resets them when coming out of sleep.

I've looked all over and I can't find where the adjustments live in the sage environment.

Thanks,

Jim

[Mike Young]

For playback, the only settings I know of are the ATI ones, not sure how they can reset when Sage sleeps that doesnt make sense. They are completley independent of Sage. I assume you are using overlay and adusting the overlay settings in the ATI contol applet.
There are settings you can control in Sage that allow you to boost or drop the settings on the encoder, I think it is under Multimedia settings but i am not with the app right now, there is a recent thread that tells you exactly where they are.
I have found those settings to be of limited use though, I seem to get better results leaving them as is and controlling the overlay settings.

mike/

[jbuszkie]

I'm not sure what's resetting it. I'm assuming it's sage. Everytime I go back the setting in the overlay section of ATI's control applet are reset.

I can't find any adjustments anywhere in the Sage setup.

Jim

[Mike Young]

I had to search for the thread I was thinking to find it....

It is in the detail settings on the multimedia tab. Click on the Video Capture settins (advanced). Then select Video Proc Amp tab.


Its hard to use because its delayed, since you are watching what is a few seconds old.

[salsbst]

Are you on Win XP? Do you have Default (uses VMR9 on Windows XP) checked in the Sage playback options? If so, then I'm not sure that the ATI overlay controls will have any effect.

As to adjusting the capture side... for the brave/experienced... a means to avoid the delay on the Hauppauge cards (using GraphEdit) http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthr...&threadid=1699

[edmc]

jbuszkie> I'm looking for a way to adjust the brightness and contrast etc.. of the playback. I can temporarily set them with ATI's overlay adjustments but Sage resets them when coming out of sleep.

Mike Young> It is in the detail settings on the multimedia tab. Click on the Video Capture settins (advanced). Then select Video Proc Amp tab.

While Mike's suggestion refers to the capture settings, not the requested ATI overlay adjustments, I can attest that Mike's suggestion is very helpful. Indeed, I find that the quality of the captured video is dramatically helped by departing from the defaults on my PVR-250.

My favorite settings are:

Brightness: 90
Contrast: 40
Hue: -5
Saturation: 70
Sharpness: -2

While your mileage will certainly vary (as several of these are highly affected by how you have both your overlay settings set and how you have your monitor's settings set), I find getting the video to capture with minimal artifacts the first problem. I'd get that tuned up first *before* playing around with display adjustments (as those will, of course, depend on the capture settings).

One final hint. When you select Video Capture Settings, the dialog box will likely be placed in the background. Simply ALT-TAB to get to the dialog box to play with the settings. Then, apply the settings, SLEEP, and UN-SLEEP Sage to get your new settings to take effect. And, of course, they will only apply to video captured after you made the adjustments :-)

[jbuszkie]

Thanks for the help. I'll try this tonight.

I didn't know that button was even a button. I thought it was just a title box! I finally clicked on it this morning and walah! a new
window! I'll play with these tonight. I wonder if I can find a happy medium. Sports look washed out (all the whites blend) and Law and Order looks too dark!

At least I know now that I can adjust them!

Thanks,

Jim "Hurry up Sage 2"

[Mike Young]

I had the same problem, sports seems to look the worst of anything. A football field is where you can really notice the difference in color. I was able to get a MUCH better color quality by using SVIDEO in from the Dish reciever, dont know why its so much better but it is much less washed out. Also, the picture looks much better when OUTPUT to Coax, than when output to composite. Been wanting to try output to Svideo, I suspect that will be the best yet.
I really think it would be of great beneifit if Sage would publish a guide to "getting the best picture possible" This is of course what everyone wants to achieve. I suspect that many folks have just given up before hitting upon the right settings!

good luck!

[salsbst]

I'm all for mo better documentation, but it's very difficult to publish such a guide because of the vastly different equipment that everyone has... for instance, you have found that remodulating to RF seems to give you the best picture (there must be something good happening to the picture in your TVs tuner?)... I don't think anybody would have come up with that as an optimal choice unless they could experiment with your equipment.