What worked for me in calibration...

[scottsupnet]

I have rhythm but the timing seemed a little off for both the guitar strums and drums. There was improvement with video/audio lag calibration. But I still kept missing notes like I was hitting the button late when I'm clearly hitting it to the beat of the song. It still seemed like I had to hit the note just a split second sooner. I tried this as an experiment and it worked for me.

I used the manual calibration where you have to strum, hit a drum or press a button on the controller. Don't use the visual. Don't even look at the screen. If you can hit the button/stum/pad at the exact timing of the audible tick. For some reason this helped me be more accurate in calibrating the game's audio to match my playing exactly.

After I did this and went into the game I was able to play with the rhythm of the song...finally!!!

[Vey]

I was curious about this. I have my calibration pretty well set up with Dolby Digital enabled (completely by chance I think), but am trying to find the right "numbers" for when I turn off DD (to make my drum fills match better). So far I'm not having as much luck.

When you calibrate manually you run thru the first calibration that has you match the position of the "notch" to where the tick is occurring.

The second calibration - they refer to it as the lag calibration I think - is the one you describe here, where you strum to the beat.

:confused:

So is the first one calibrating the video to the audio? Matching them up so the colored bars cross the line on the beat?

And the second one is calibrating the input of the instrument to the audio, so if you strum or tap on the beat you're successfully hitting the note?

I'd really like to understand these better so I know which one to change when I'm just running into an audio/controller issue, or when I'm just running into an audio/video issue.

[Bakkster]

So is the first one calibrating the video to the audio? Matching them up so the colored bars cross the line on the beat?

And the second one is calibrating the input of the instrument to the audio, so if you strum or tap on the beat you're successfully hitting the note?

Yes, that is correct. First it synchronizes the audio and video, then it syncs the input to the A/V.

[Vey]

That helps a lot. Thanks.

I did notice something interesting with the lag (the second calibration screen) option. I play much more to the audio that the video. So after getting the Audio/Video synced up to a tolerable level I ran the lag calibration without looking at the TV. I first ran it on the drums, tapping the blue drum head to the best. I ran it over and over until I could get the same results multiple times. Turned out it was about 60ms, rather than the 15 I had it set to. This worked great. I could play several tracks on expert and hit all the fast repetitive quarter note parts.

Then I tried the same thing with the guitar. I expected it to be the same, if not a bit longer delay (as it takes me just the slightest bit longer to strum than it does to hit a drum) but it was the opposite. It turns out the guitar came in around 34-40ms. So I compromised and picked 50ms. That seems to be good enough for the drums. I'll find out if it works for my guitarist when she tries it (and likely say sit sucks! :rolleyes:).

So If I had one suggestion to offer it'd be this: Focus on the second calibration - the Lag setting. If you play to the beat (you're more focused on audio than video), look away from the TV and calibrate only to the audio. Do it over and over with each instrument, and then find a compromise.

[toefer]

Is there a reason why the manual calibration makes things worse?

When my guitar strum first started to break down, I thought maybe it was a calibration issue, so I changed from the auto-LCD TV one, to the manual calibration. I did the tick thing, and the strum thing, then went back and played. And it was horrible. The lag, I guess, wasn't even close. I'd hit notes just as they crossed the screen, and missed every single one.

The auto setting seems to work fine, except on drums, if I tap the bass pedal before a song starts, I notice a slight delay between hitting it and seeing/hearing it on the TV. Because of this I figured the manual calibration would tweak it enough to make it perfect, but that didn't seem to be the case. Am I doing something wrong?

*Also, when singing, there is a delay between singing, and hearing/seeing it on the TV, but I think that happens to everyone, right?

[Vey]

Is there a reason why the manual calibration makes things worse?

When my guitar strum first started to break down, I thought maybe it was a calibration issue, so I changed from the auto-LCD TV one, to the manual calibration. I did the tick thing, and the strum thing, then went back and played. And it was horrible. The lag, I guess, wasn't even close. I'd hit notes just as they crossed the screen, and missed every single one.

The auto setting seems to work fine, except on drums, if I tap the bass pedal before a song starts, I notice a slight delay between hitting it and seeing/hearing it on the TV. Because of this I figured the manual calibration would tweak it enough to make it perfect, but that didn't seem to be the case. Am I doing something wrong?

*Also, when singing, there is a delay between singing, and hearing/seeing it on the TV, but I think that happens to everyone, right?

You're running into two separate issues, and I'd bet that's causing the confusion. When you hit the drum before a song "starts" and you hear a delay, that's part of a known issue with both drum fills and mic lag that isn't currently fixable. In fact, it's made worse by setting a higher lag settings. It's talked about at length in this thread:

http://community.rockband.com/vbforum/showthread.php?t=10861

The lag that makes it difficult to hit the beat, that's what calibration is supposed to fix. If you tried Auto-LCD and it worked great, leave it there. Read thru the other thread and try some of the suggestion to reduce the drum fill / mic lag. You can't fully get rid of it, but there are ways to make it better.

Manual calibration CAN (with enough time put into it) fine tun the system quite well for hitting the right beats. First you match your video to your audio (so you hear the note at the same time the colored bar crosses the bottom of the screen). Then you calibrate this synced audio/video to your instrument. So you tap or strum to the tick. Some people play the game by audio, by beat (I'm one of those people), and for these people I recommend you focus on the audio part of this second calibration. If instead you play by video, watching the screen when doing the second calibration might help. I find this very difficult though, and when I tried this way my lag was all messed up.

The final test is how the game plays. In practice mode I picked a song with a very long string of fast repetitive beats (most of the warm-up songs work just fine for this) and played it on Expert. I tried playing along, just to the Snare (red) and Top Hat (Yellow) pads to see if I could keep the beat without error. If my lag was set wrong I'd miss some of them and hit others. Once the lag was set correctly I'd hit every one flawlessly. In my case I'd close my eyes or look away from the TV, so I was sure to be matching up with the audio. (Note: It helps to have someone else in the room to tell you if you're missing). You could do the same with the guitar.