Babylon 5 DVDs - the technical issues

Babylon 5 was an awesome series.  If you're a sci fi person and you haven't seen it, you should.  If you liked Star Trek DS9, you'll like Bab 5 even more (and, um, that's not a coincidence. ^_^;)

However, the DVD releases have some technical issues.  The way I hear it, Straczynski was perhaps a little too farsighted.  He realized that 16:9 proportion HDTVs were coming and that syndicated reruns and video sets of TV series were going to have a market and acted accordingly, and IMHO that actually makes the current release worse than it would have been if he'd been as shortsighted as everyone else in the mid 90s.

Three problem areas:  Live action shots, CG shots, and live action w/ CG special effects.  (Yeah, that pretty much covers everything.  Hang with me here, though.)

Live action shots have the least problems.  Straczynski realized that widescreen TVs were coming and so taped the live action portions in widescreen on high resolution movie film.  However, shots were still framed for the ubiquitous 4:3 TVs at the time.  So at best, there's a lot of basically empty space on the sides of every wide shot.  Close-ups are worse, though.  A lot of his closeups are so close to show facial expressions that the tops of heads are cut off.  This was fine on a 4:3 where the framing made it obvious (or more accurately, less jarring) that this is why the heads are chopped off.  But in widescreen, you've got someone's hairline cut off and tons of empty space in the sides of the shot.  It looks for all the world like they've made a mock widescreen by cutting off the tops and bottoms of a 4:3 shot.
(Even knowing scenes were actually filmed widescreen, I'm still convinced the Sci Fi channel did just cut off portions of some of the later episodes during their first widescreen showing, because the contents of Cartagia's desk were really quite important to that scene.  But that's beside the point.)

Bigger problem is the CG scenes.  They were NOT originally rendered in high resolution 16:9.  The idea was that by the time 16:9 HDTVs became commonplace, computer rendering technology would be much better, so they would just re-render the scenes for widescreen with the better technology.  I can see where at the time that seemed like a good idea, especially given how slow rendering was at the time (and probably still is, really).  Looking back, I can also see how what actually happened was almost inevitable.

See, there were a few important questions that were not answered when they made this decision.  Will the future technology be backwards compatible with our files?  Will our files be high resolution enough to look good with the future technology? And, the one that bit them in the ass, do we have a robust storage system for all of our files?

When you're doing CGI, you aren't working with a single file.  Usually each object, or at least each major object, is in a separate file for easier reuse and lower file sizes.  Well, they've lost some of the models; they just don't have them any more.

So, they CAN'T re-render the CG scenes, because they don't have some of the important files.  They don't have good archival copies of the CG scenes, because "we're just going to re-render those".  All they have is the lower resolution NTSC format.
So, they're mixing the excellent image quality of the widescreen live-action scenes with the absolutely awful quality of the NTSC CG scenes that have not been stored well.  To be perfectly honest, the switching back and forth from great quality to horrible gives me a headache to watch.

And, of course, to widescreen the CG shots they do have to chop off bits of the screen.

The worst to me, though, are scenes where CG effects are used in live action shots.  They can't redo the CG effects.  Sometimes they can recomposite the original effects over the better widescreen footage, which doesn't always looks so good.  Sometimes they can't even do that and the entire image quality drops, which gives the effect of "Whoa, Delenn, you went all fuzzy all of a sudden".  And whenever they do a composite shot, they have to chop off bits to maintain the widescreen ratio, because they don't have the sides of the shot in the special effects footage.

Lots of fans are unhappy with the image quality on the DVDs, and of course everyone has different ideas of how it could be fixed.  Me personally, assuming it's possible, I'd rather have just the original 4:3 format shows, with the associated lower image quality in the live action shots but consistent quality throughout.  It's the jump in quality between scenes depending on whether there's CG or not that gives me headaches.  And frankly, I'd rather have the full shots of the CG scenes than the extra unessential side areas of the live shots that we get when converting to 16:9.