Babylon 5

Babylon 5 is an epic science fiction television series created, produced, and largely written by J. Michael Straczynski. The music for the TV series and related TV movies was composed by Christopher Franke. The pilot movie, The Gathering, aired on February 22, 1993, and the regular series initially aired from January 26, 1994 through November 25, 1998, first in syndication on the short-lived Prime Time Entertainment Network, then on cable network TNT. Because the show was aired every week in the United Kingdom on Channel 4 without a break, the last four or five episodes of the early seasons were shown in the UK before the US.

Mastering problems

The transfer of Babylon 5 to DVD created significant problems with regard to special-effects/CGI footage. Several factors complicated the process.

Related Topics:
Special-effects - CGI

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• Although originally broadcast in the standard television aspect ratio of , all live-action footage was filmed on Super 35 film (with a ratio of ). The idea was that, once widescreen televisions (with an aspect ratio of or ) became more popular, the episodes could be easily converted into a widescreen format.
• CGI shots were rendered in the 4:3 ratio, but designed so that the top and bottom of each shot could be removed to create a widescreen image without ruining the image composition.
• All of the purely live-action shots were stored as high-definition digital images.
• However, CGI shots, and shots combining live-action with CGI, were stored in the much lower-definition NTSC digital format. (Again, the expectation was that it would be relatively cheap in the future to recreate the CGI as widescreen.)
• Over the years, the original computer-generated models, etc. have been lost, making it necessary to use the old 4:3 CGI shots.

This has resulted in several consistent flaws throughout the Babylon 5 DVD release. In particular, quality drops very significantly whenever a scene cuts from purely live-action to a shot combining live-action and CGI. This is especially noticeable on the PAL DVDs, since CGI shots had to be converted from NTSC as well as being blown up to fit a widescreen television.

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