Pro-scan switching on the fly?

[Jedi2016]

So I'm about to get my new TV here in a couple days.. Westinghouse LVM-47W1. I've got a Sony DVP-NS575P progressive-scan DVD player. But it's a lower-end model, and I've heard mixed reviews about it's pro-scan capabilities.

So I'm considering just forgoing the pro-scan on the DVD player and letting the TV handle it, since it includes the necessary hardware/firmware to perform inverse 3:2 pulldown on film sources.

But, naturally, I want the best quality. The easiest way, of course, is to play the same footage both ways. Letting the DVD player do it, then letting the TV do it, and seeing which is better.

But if the differences are slight, it might be harder to tell which is better after stopping the disc, flipping the little pro-scan switch on the back of the player, and then playing it again. So I'm pondering the idea of hot-switching the pro-scan on and off while the movie is still playing.

Is this risky to the player? It would be one thing if it were entirely software driven, and there was a button on the remote, but the player actually has a little switch on the back of the unit to turn pro-scan on and off. Do you guys think it'd be safe to flip that switch back and forth on the fly? Or should I play "better safe than sorry" and just stop the player to switch it?

 

[markw]

Just because it's triggered by a switch, don't kid yourself.

It's still software driven. It's just one less code the remote has to send.

but, I'm curious too. LEt us know how it works.

FWIW, to switch my HDMI output on the DVD the unit has to be in the "stop" mode.

 

[Jedi2016]

Got it hooked up today.

Couldn't figure it out at first because I had no picture.. I had disconnected the composite cable this morning, so it was running through component. At first, I thought the player was still defaulted to the composite cable, and I'd have to re-hook it up to switch it over, but it ended up being a loose cable on the back of the player. The green cable wasn't plugged in all the way (I got a phone call while I had the thing pulled out halfway, and hooked it up with one hand). It looks like the TV knows whether or not it's receiving all three component signals, so it turns the whole input off if it's missing one. As soon as I snugged up the green cable, the monitor snapped on. Weird.

Anyhoo. Yeah, the switch works fine when hot-swapped. The TV throws a fit for a second, but it does that every time you switch inputs, too, since it has to reorient itself to whatever the new input is. Takes it about two seconds to analyze the incoming signal, process it, and begin displaying it. That's just a delay in the appearance of the image, the actual processing is of course realtime, still perfectly synced to the audio, which is split off separately and going directly to the receiver.

The end result? I couldn't see any difference. If anything, the image was slightly sharper when it was interlaced, letting the TV handle the entire 480i-to-1080p conversion rather than just the upscaling. So I just turned it off and left it alone. One less thing, I guess.

I desperately need to get the TV properly calibrated, though. I ran it through a quick THX calibration on The Incredibles DVD, but I ended up watching Finding Nemo instead (I wanted a 16:9 picture so I could watch it "full screen" on the new TV). Turns out this is one of those situations where the THX calibration is specific to the movie on the same disc. My settings ended up being off for Nemo, with the color and/or contrast turned up too high (Dory ended up getting a lot of crushed blue color, so I ended up adjusting it mid-movie). I'm also still missing the blue filter glasses (THX is taking their sweet time sending it to me), so I don't really know how to properly calibrate the color, I'm kind of stuck calibrating just the brightness/contrast.

But that's a story for a different thread.. hehe. End result, yes, the pro-scan switch can be switched on-the-fly without any ill effects. And in my case, the TV appears to do a better job than the DVD player. That will vary on a case by case basis, of course, since everyone has a unique setup.

 

[Jedi2016]

UPDATE:

I did find one situation where the DVD does pro-scan better than the TV. It's something I've only recently learned about, but now I know exactly what it is. They call it the "chroma bug", where pro-scan imagery shows jagged bleeding of very vivid red colors. It has to do with how the image is deinterlaced, combined with the way MPEG-2 compression works with the color space of the source material.

In most cases, the DVD player can fix this, recreating red just as accurately as everything else (there are exceptions, depending on how the source is encoded). The TV, however, doesn't fix it at all. I noticed this today when I popped in Cars just to see how it looked, because the main character is a very bright red color.

I still think the TV yeilds a slightly sharper picture doing it's own pro-scan, but the DVD player can fix the chroma bug. So I'll probably do it on a case-by-case basis... leaving the DVD player set to "Normal" most the time, unless I'm watching a movie with a lot of red tones in it, then I'll switch it to "Progressive". Movies like Cars or The Incredibles or (if I can ever find it), Hardware, which is shot almost entirely in red light. Call it an odd artistic choice, certainly, but it works within that film.. pity DVD is so harsh to reds.. hehe. Of course, with my luck, it'd be one of those that isn't quite flagged right for pro-scan, and the DVD player wouldn't be able to fix the chroma thing, and it'd probably be in non-anamorphic widescreen, which my TV thumbs its nose at.