Kevin254
Member
Full episodes are going back up on the official Babylon 5 channel this month, free, after the earlier run this year was pulled and replaced with clip reels. Three are already live including the pilot, The Gathering. No subscription, no region lock beyond the usual platform rules.
Good news, and it also drags the show's oldest AV problem back into daylight. B5 was shot on 35mm but the rest of the finishing was pure 90s television. The live action was framed 4:3 with widescreen protected, while the effects shots and every composite were finished on standard definition video and never re-rendered. That is the whole reason every attempt to present the show in HD and 16:9 has been a compromise. The film elements can be rescanned, the effects cannot, and a huge share of B5 is effects. You end up choosing which half of the show looks wrong.
So which master they uploaded actually matters. Go with the HD remaster and you get sharper live action next to effects shots that look photographed off a monitor. Go with the older masters and you get consistency and softness all the way through. Neither is what a fresh scan would give you, because a fresh scan is impossible without redoing the effects from scratch, and nobody is funding that for a 90s syndicated drama.
YouTube's encoder will have opinions too. Slow star drift over black is close to a worst case for a bitrate-starved codec, and B5 is mostly slow star drift over black.
Has anyone got eyes on the first three uploads? Curious which master they went with.
Good news, and it also drags the show's oldest AV problem back into daylight. B5 was shot on 35mm but the rest of the finishing was pure 90s television. The live action was framed 4:3 with widescreen protected, while the effects shots and every composite were finished on standard definition video and never re-rendered. That is the whole reason every attempt to present the show in HD and 16:9 has been a compromise. The film elements can be rescanned, the effects cannot, and a huge share of B5 is effects. You end up choosing which half of the show looks wrong.
So which master they uploaded actually matters. Go with the HD remaster and you get sharper live action next to effects shots that look photographed off a monitor. Go with the older masters and you get consistency and softness all the way through. Neither is what a fresh scan would give you, because a fresh scan is impossible without redoing the effects from scratch, and nobody is funding that for a 90s syndicated drama.
YouTube's encoder will have opinions too. Slow star drift over black is close to a worst case for a bitrate-starved codec, and B5 is mostly slow star drift over black.
Has anyone got eyes on the first three uploads? Curious which master they went with.
