Babylon 5 on Blu Ray

[AndyThomas]

It's finally here folks! Or it will be... or it always has been... https://amzn.to/3ryyUqa

[Crash]

Wow!
Just wow,
Thanks for the info, I would love to see this.

In the age of AI, it's not so difficult as it was to do with Star Trek TNG, and you can even make it look good where the original film and CGI models are all missing.

I was thinking about having another watch-through, even though it's only a year or two ago since I watched it.

I hear that Foundation has a second series out - it's an odd show, but quite interesting: like Expanse and Dune rolled into one.

[felice]

I'm rewatching B5 at the moment. It's a pity it's such a budget release - the show deserves better - but the picture quality is certainly a big step up from the DVDs.

Foundation is a weird show. I'm not impressed with it as an adaptation, but the original Empire stuff is pretty cool.

[Crash]

I heard that the picture quality of this bluray is good - as good as it can get without them re-rendering the CGI with models that they no longer even have.
The zip disks and floppy disks that had the models for the Omega destroyer and others were lost in the chaos of Foundation Imaging.

Apparently, it is the same as the HD remaster that they did about a year ago for an online streaming service but made even better.

I'm not sure I feel like splashing £85 on it, right now though.


The Foundation series is certainly interesting but many of the main characters are hard to relate to, because they're all just equally unlikeable variations of michael burnham from star trek discovery.
I like the day emperor. He's really good. He just wants to destroy everything - very relatable.
Seldon/Harris is entertaining too, as he was in The Expanse.

[felice]

They could have re-rendered a significant chunk of the CGI for a pretty minimal cost. Some of the files were lost, but not all of them - see https://www.youtube.com/@tomsmith6107/videos (he used to have several more videos up). And they could have included both versions of The Gathering in 4:3 on the first disc, instead of a version cropped to 16:9 on a bonus disc that's inferior to the DVD. And not included commercial bumpers, and provided decent packaging. But the actual episodes look great, and five seasons for £85 is still a bargain.

[Crash]

You're totally right. I would've preferred to have seen the CGI re-done.
I'd come across Tom's work a good while back but it seems to have come a long way since then, and it was already very impressive.

I suppose the problem is paying a CGI studio to have your own copyrighted version of the new exterior shots, rather than what has clearly been a colossal labour of love for this particular fan.

In any case, this is very good info about something that I was planning on buying anyway.
It looks like you can get it new for a lot less on ebay and on amazon as well.

It's so sad that we have nothing being made right now that compares that favourably against Babylon 5.
What amazes me as well is how true-to-life it is right now, with its weak, controlled puppet leaders and fake news ISN.


At the moment, I'm watching Space Precinct.
I used to love that show when I was little. The miniature shots are great and they give the show such a great atmosphere.

[felice]

Tom is using the original files, though, not rebuilding from scratch. Give those same files to a professional studio (or better, just pay Tom!) and the cost would be pretty low, by the standards of such things. You could render those effects in realtime on a home PC these days!

There's nothing quite like B5, but I've been enjoying For All Mankind, and The Expanse was pretty cool (I'm still hoping they adapt the final books at some point).

[AndyThomas]

The problem with CGI on B5 is that much of it is composited with pesky humans. So you can do pure exterior shots of ship battles etc, but other stuff - I don't know. I'm sure AI could have a stab at it, but...

[Crash]

The impression I get is that all the CGI was done on a complete shoestring back then. Netter Digital and Foundation imaging always seemed to be on the brink of going broke.

I was watching interviews and reading some accounts from the animators on the wayback machine, on the making of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, which was done by Netter and Foundation - the same as Babylon 5.
This was after I found the non-DVD-released episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/@nwk123/videos

The animators and modellers came across as being extremely talented and ingenious people that were working insanely difficult hours and were often treated as disposable and interchangeable by their companies.
This was sometimes mentioned on their personal sites, where they would showcase their work.
I got a lot of leads from this site here: https://downthetubes.net/webfind-dan-da ... -dave-max/

I think, in the 90s, a fair few people in television didn't take 3D animation very seriously, outside of children's television, like Max Steel and Reboot.
It was a niche service and there was no established way of doing things. The only constant seemed to have been organised chaos.

As long as the current episode/series got done, nothing else mattered. That's why there looks to have been no backups or DR or any data protection, even though the technologies existed back in 1994. Everything was kept on various individual disks, that were discarded as soon as a project was over.

They didn't seem to use (at least not consistently) a central NAS server with RAID or replication to share data and back it up.
It looks to me that they passed those disks around to eachother inside the office.
And it's not like there was anything to archive their work, once both companies popped in the early 2000s.

So, it's not even like the Star Trek TNG remaster, where they had 95%+ of the original film clips that were compiled to re-create the special effects shots digitally, rather than on video tape.
At that point, anything that they were missing, they could add in again with CGI, or replace anything that didn't hold up 30-odd years later.

So, unless someone does an enormous amount of work to re-create the CGI scenes from scratch, and then signs the right away, then you're right.
All you can do is try to polish the existing footage with AI.
Then you have the additional problem that you mention of compositing that new footage with the live action shots of the characters, which is also going to be difficult.

Nobody will want to throw that much money at the B5 series, for the same reasons that CBS/Paramount won't spend money blu-raying DS9 and Voyager - The juice isn't worth the squeeze to them.
In any case, Paramount is being sold to ... someone currently. Paramount is announcing many Star Trek movies (which will never be made) probably to pad out the value of their franchise. This is at the same time that many of the dreadful nutrek shows are being shuttered.

I'm watching Star Trek Voyager at the moment. Once I get a little closer to the end of the series, I'll get the Babylon 5 blu-ray and see how good it is.

[felice]

The problem with CGI on B5 is that much of it is composited with pesky humans. So you can do pure exterior shots of ship battles etc, but other stuff - I don't know.

Yeah, the composite shots are a problem. If the raw pre-CGI film still exists, the CGI overlays could be redone, but that's a pretty big if.