Babylon 5 has been fully remastered, by the way, available for purchase or on HBO Max. Just dropped last week, and it’s excellent. The previous DVD remaster was an abomination.
Warner Bros spent 6 years on the new remaster. It was reportedly a labor of love by those involved.
can you elaborate on how the remastering affects the quality? what do you see in the remastered version that you didn't see in the older version or the original?
I haven't watched the HBO Max version yet, just seen some comparison vids and shots, but the DVD conversion handled the special effects shots very poorly. The original show was broadcast in SD 4:3 which is what the effects were rendered at. The DVD conversion went to 16:9 widescreen, since that's what the film was shot at, but then decided to get 16:9 effects shots by zooming in and cropping the already-low-SD-resolution renders. So it's now basically half resolution, and then run that through an interlaced DVD and put it on a big HDTV, and it looks awful. The effects shots also include a lot of conversations and other shots with people, since they used quite a few virtual sets.
From the comparison shots I've seen of the new version, they kept everything 4:3, and instead of cropping the effects shots, did a pretty decent job upscaling them instead. So it's not HD quality like if they were rendered in HD, but at least it's not sub-broadcast-quality anymore.
I knew Ron Thornton a little bit back when he was doing the CGI for B5 because of his use of the Amiga and Lightwave. I didn't know he had died until I saw this article. He was an amazing artist.
I only saw it when it first came out but IMO it's a show you need to know what you're going to get. There are certainly things to strongly recommend it but, at the same time, (just) some of the acting is pretty weak, the CGI was innovative mostly in the context of working within a small budget, and the pacing/plotting towards the end was disrupted because the show didn't know if it would be renewed.
