But guys, what are those black bars at the edges of my screen? :P
Obviously those bastards filmed vertical! Gotta turn those phones, people.
This is coming to HBO Max on January 26th? I probably can’t stand watching the whole series again. A lot of what drove me to keep watching was not knowing what would happen next. Pure curiosity. I didn’t enjoy the journey itself as much. But once it’s on streaming maybe I’ll check out some of the stronger episodes. Need to start looking for guides on the best episodes.
Edit: to clarify, the series is coming to Max, not the follow up movies.
Thanks for the heads up!
As long as they never post that god awful Rangers spinoff movie/pilot, I did actually enjoy the follow up movies. Hopefully those come later.
I will be curious to see if these are 16:9 (to match the faux-widescreen DVDs with horribly cropped effects), or the 4:3 originals.
And by the way, if anyone wants to see them in 4:3, I believe Vudu has all the seasons in their original 4:3 format, minus a few episodes here and there.
Go to iTunes or Amazon for the 4:3 version now. Both iTunes and Amazon reverted back to the 4:3 version in the last month and they are a much high quality version than VUDU.
I recently rewatched the entire series. Season 1 is still tough to get through. The rest of it was pretty great. Even the final season, which I remember not liking as much because of stooped telepath story. But it turn out there were really only a few episodes of that before the season moved on to other things. I would say the series is still worth a watch.
Season 2 works well as a starting point. It’s how we watched it the first time years ago, checking it out because Boxleitner had joined the cast.
This is up on HBOMax now. Appears to be a new HD transfer no idea on the quality.
Yeah, this popped up in my news feed earlier.
‘Babylon 5 Remastered’ now available to buy or stream on HBO Max | Engadget
A Warner Bros. spokesperson told Engadget that Babylon 5 Remastered has been scanned from the original camera negative. The film sequences were scanned in 4K and then “finished,” or downscaled, back to HD, with a dirt and scratch clean-up, as well as color correction. The show’s CGI and composite sequences, meanwhile, have been digitally upscaled to HD with only some minor tweaks where absolutely necessary.
In order to maintain visual quality and fidelity between the show’s filmed and effects-heavy sequences, the new version is only available in 4:3. That’s the same format that the show was originally broadcast in, rather than the widescreen DVD releases. But it does avoid the issue of image inconsistency that have plagued those DVD releases when they launched.
I was watching a bit of the “The Gathering” pilot tonight. HBO Max oddly describes it as “Season 1 Episode 1”. When Babylon 5 was on Amazon Prime a few years ago and posts upthread, the pilot was the absolute original, with the vintage Stewart Copeland score. The HBO Max version is the recut version that TNT paid for after PTEN went belly up. Its aim was to have better editing, add a drop of foreshadowing through ADR, and to have Christopher Franke rescore it. It is still widescreen though, and some of the close-ups as a result look a little oddly framed. But the cinematography in the non-CGI scenes look really great, and there’s so much detail that I never saw before. One of the bartenders on the Zocalo is some kind of space ape. Wish he had shown up in the series proper.
My wife couldn’t help scoffing at the “Universe Today” newspapers people were reading… That part of the future didn’t age very well.
I liked the friendly relationship that Laurel Takishima and Ben Kyle had with each other, though Lord knows their dialogue was clunky. Wish they had survived to the series proper along with that Space Ape Bartender. I know Kyle was mentioned in dialogue later on as having become a medical bigwig back on Earth. And Laurel was originally slated to become a traitor, maybe even the one that shoots Garibaldi in the back. But does anyone remember if her character is mentioned again in the actual series?
Anyway, so far, it looks good. I hope that the Vorlon armada that will show up at the end of the pilot looks “visually stunning”.
I streamed about 5 minutes of The Gathering this morning just to see what the quality looks like, and I have to admit, it looks way better than what airs in SD quality everyday in Babylon 5 reruns over the air.
Damn it, someone needs to do this for Deep Space Nine too.
Just so you’re all aware, “The Gathering” isn’t remastered the same way as the rest of it since some of the originals were lost and couldn’t be rescanned. They’re apparently using some prior cable re-release for it.
They briefly do in the first normal episode, but I don’t recall much else later on. I read that they were trying to keep the first normal episode fairly standalone since the pilot had aired many months before, so I’m thinking that explains dropping those characters so fully.
Bought season 1 more or less to support the remastering effort. (I have the entire series on DVD, but we know about the quality of those). The remaster pretty much looks as good as it’s going to get, since resurrecting the actors and starting a Kickstarter to completely remake the show isn’t going to happen.
Yeah, it looks like I pulled the trigger on those 4:3 Vudu versions a few months too early. Oh well! I’d rather have new versions available than not. But wow, for all the prep work they tried to do for a future widescreen release, those earlier DVD releases really were a perfect storm on poor source material and bad mastering decisions. The awkward zooming really sticks out every time an effects shot comes in.
I keep forgetting I have access to HBO Max. Looks like I’ve got a new project.
A few episodes in, and yep, the visual quality difference between the remasters and the DVDs are astonishing. Even the OG CGI looks passable.
I don’t like to throw around the word “unwatchable” when it comes to older technology, but yeah…even if you love the show enough to own the DVDs, the upscaling on the effects is criminal and borderline unwatchable. I’m really glad that they got upgraded to “passable”.
At least the DVDs have a number of commentaries with the cast and other featurettes. That’s why I haven’t tossed mine in the trash yet. Tossing my B5 VHS cassettes, laboriously taped with one itchy finger on the pause button to skip the commercials, was hard enough.
I imagine it would be even more difficult to toss those VHS tapes if, say, you printed out custom labels for each one using the authentic Serpentine font.