No Advanced Babylon 5 Reviews? (1 Viewer)

[Joseph DeMartino]

TAU is Total Action Universe, a Canadian retailer which, thanks to the exchange rate and their own pre-order discounts, often offers the lowest prices on expensive boxed sets. (The B5 set was around $53 USD in August.) I've been buying my X-Files sets from them for two years, along with a few other items, and have never had a problem.
The current delays (which also affect DVDSoon and other retailers) seem to have two sources: 1) Warner Bros. officially pushed back the release date in Canada by a week - although many retailers ignored this change. 2) It seems likely that WHV changed the Canadian date to buy time to replace all those misprinted Disc 2s that really had the contents of Disc 4, and/or to do something about the case problem and the damaged discs. Since the official U.S. release came first, and since these problems seem to be so widespread, it seems likely that WHV is having trouble physically getting the discs out, and that it is dealing with returns from U.S retailers first, because they had permission to sell the set a week earlier. This has necessarily pushed shipments to Canada back, obviously more than the one week everybody expected. I seriously doubt that TAU is hording discs and refusing to ship them. I'm sure the problem is that they don't have any discs to ship (or at least not any sets they can be confident are good and won't be returned) and that they're waiting on Warner Bros.
Regards,
Joe

 

[Michael Sliger]

I am sure that TAU is having problems getting enough product to ship in some cases. However, I received my shipping notice 11 days ago, so I have to assume that they had enough stock to fill my order. That package is not here yet. My X-Files Season 6 set took 9 days to come after my confirmation email came (and I had to harrass them by email to ship it in the first place). My X-Files Season 5 order back in May took 3 weeks after the supposed shipping date to get to me. Purchases that my friends and I have made from other retailers in Canada and the UK almost always arrive via airmail in 6 days or less (no major customs delays), so I am starting to suspect that there is no correlation between the reported and actual ship date (customer service and shipping dept not communicating, no daily pickup by post office, etc.). There are no postmarks on the packages, so I can't confirm this theory. All I do know is that similar retailers don't seem have this problem. Those shops will be getting my business from now on.

 

[John Graves]

So, it wasn't the head of Warner Home Video, it was really the head of TAU that was spotted on the Grassy Knoll! Yikes!
Good Viewing,
John G

 

[Dave Scarpa]

OK will my set finally came from Amazon.Ca onFriday and hearing all te complaints on the case hubs I feared the worst. I had one disk that came loose but no damage.

Switching the DVD Player to video mode does help theeffect a bit, but I see wat people mean on the little glitches or scratches that come on the screen from time to time. It's really too bad cause these should look better than they do.

The video presentation remainds me a bit as to wen you use the players zoom capability to crop a 2.35 image to fill the screen. The video looks like that.

 

[Dave Scarpa]

Another Comment B5 is like Video Crack I started watching today and 8 episodes later. This show and Sopranos just hook you like no other. Some eps look better than others "Parliament of Dreams" ep number 5 is grainy as hell. And was this show always this Dark? I remember it being a bit brighter. There are numerous scratches and bllops that show and Warner shoul've really taken care of these blemishes before tey released the Set . I Hope they do a better job on Season 2.

 

[morrisjones]

The show was lighted quite a bit differently between seasons 1 and 2. Season 1 was always a bit darker.

Mojo

 

[Aaron_Brez]

Yep. I think JMS commented that they "knocked the cameras up one f-stop" in season 2 and beyond. Season one was pretty dark.

 

[Gord Lacey]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the scenes that look like they came from VHS. I just posted my review of the set at http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/siterevi...ReleaseID=1412 and I must warn you, I gave the video very low marks. There is far too much dust on the early episodes and I also went into a very detailed explanation of the "VHS quality" scenes which are in almost every episode.
Since you guys are the B5 masters, I'm interested in what you think of the review. I might be a little harsh in a few places. I know some reviewers tend to lighten their reviews for fear of backlash from the studios but I'd rather tell it how it is.
Gord
P.S. from my notes I have "Blue lines in ball scene (ep 2, 11:00)" jotted down. I know there was some discussion about it in this thread.

 

[Michael Sliger]

Gord, there has not been much mention about the occasional cropping and subsequent resolution drops because most of the fans knew that those problems were coming. I was a little annoyed to see that cropping was also employed to keep "gradual fade" scene transitions intact that did not have any CGI present (see "Believers" at 16:48, 26:34, and 35:07 for examples). I cannot see why those scenes could not be recomposed using the original film footage, but there is no other way that the other cropped material could be made to look any better. The dirt and scratches can be repaired, but WHV was not sure about sales figures and didn't spend the money to fix those issues. Now that they know that the disks will sell well, we can only hope that they will do a little more re-mastering work for the future seasons.
The stretched shot you mentioned was also seen in the Sci-Fi broadcasts (a similar screen cap has been available at http://www.speakeasy.org/~xyzzy/b5/ for a few years now). I was saddened to see that it was not corrected for the DVD as there appears to be room to crop it to 16x9.
Your review is fair, accurate and shows that you did your homework. I cannot gripe about it.

 

[John Graves]

Hi Folks,
If I'm not mistaken, the masters used for Season 1's DVD set are the ones WHV created for the SciFi channel. There are some things you may be able to do with your equipment to help minimize the rough spots in the transfers, we're still dealing with principal photography that was shot 16x9, and CGI that was created in a 4x3 format. In some instances, Composite shots combine both the 16x9 and 4x3 elements. Mix all of this together, then create a new 16x9 anamorphic DVD and you're bound to have image quality problems. Factor in as well the comparatively low budget and we should probably be happy that the episodes look as good as they do.
FWIW, after cringing when I watched a couple of episodes on my 93" diagonal 16x9 front projection system, I took one of the discs on a business trip and watched them on my portable DVD player. On a 7-inch screen the episodes look fine.
Good Viewing,
John G

 

[Aaron_Brez]

Gord,

Your review was more than fair. I love the series deeply, but the PQ on this set is amazingly bad.

More stretching I saw was in the episode "The War Prayer", right as the Centauri kid gets zapped. Pathetic. Should have cropped it.

 

[Philip Verdieck]

This is pathetic, but it is expected from Warner, given the way they have handled B5.

Right. Warner Bros. hates B5 so much that they bought substandard case deliberately, so that thousands of discs would be damaged, angry customers would return them to retailers and retailers in turn would get pissed off with Warner Home Video. This is exactly how business decisions are made in offices all over this country every day. Everybody knows that major corporations screw things up deliberately to offend their own customers, and that they make major business decisions based on emotional reactions to their own products.

Sheesh!

Regards,

Joe

That is 1 way of thinking about it.

Another is

1) Warner, a large conglomerate, has a history of not taking care of their materials. This is currently an issue with all studios and their older properties. This was also demonstrated with their newer properties, as in B5 materials lost and eaten by rats.

2) The QC issue with the case design were easily detectable by minimal inspection. The ridiculously low amount of friction attained by the hubs on the discs is proof.

3) Warner has historically been blase and misunderstood B5. Then there were the rampant denials that it had ever been mentioned for release on DVD.

Sum up all of these, and one can see the point I was making.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

I don't think Warner Bros. makes the cases used for the B5 DVD. Because snappers are impractical for TV boxed sets they went to an outside supplier, presumably one that had produced satisfactory work for others in the past. A drag that this happened, but seeing this as part of a "pattern" of their "mistreatment" of B5 seems excessive. (They didn't do a good job of storing the negatives for The Gathering? Granted. But chances are they didn't do a better job of storing the negatives from any of their other old TV pilots that they never expected anybody to re-edit. I doubt that this represents some kind of anti-B5 bias.)
Regards,
Joe