Joseph DeMartino
Senior HTF Member
One other question, though, that hasn't been answered yet (unless I missed it): how long will the "lost elements/need to intercut 4x3 material" last?For the entire series. The CGI was always rendered at 1.33:1 (mostly because the systems in use at the time didn't allow them to do anything else, but even if they had, the time pressure of weekly television would likely have made it difficult to render them at a full 1.77:1. Several episodes were finished only hours before they had to be uplinked to the satellite as it was.) That includes CGI/live action composites.
The "lost files" is a bit of a red-herring because there was never much chance that Warner Bros. was going to pony-up to completely re-compose and re-render all of CGI and composite shots. But it is true that now they don't even have the option, because the original CGI computer models and backgrounds were all mistakenly discarded by Warner Bros. (The FX companies that created them were required, by contract, to turn over all their back-up files of the B5 material when they finished work on the show, then delete their own copies. So the discarded Warner copies were the only ones that existed. Re-doing the CGI now would mean recreating it all from scratch.)
The irony is that much of the trouble with the DVD version is the result of the technology moving faster than everyone anticipated. In 1992 everyone knew that there was this thing called HDTV in the works, but it was ill-defined. The decision was made to "future proof" the show by shooting in Super35 with an eventual widescreen version in mind.
JMS also always looked forward to a widescreen laserdisc version. That would, of course, have been letterboxed. Nobody knew from 16:9-enhanced at the time. A straight letterbox transfer would not have been nearly as much of a problem, since everything would just be cropped - the CGI/Composite scenes from the 1.33:1 originals, the rest of the show from the oversized Super35 frame. Pretty much every shot was composed with this in mind anyway, so it wouldn't have been a terribly big deal.*
The problem is the anamorphic process. That makes the live action look great, but requires blowing up and cropping the CGI. However, I submit the following for consideration:
If the show had been done in straight letterbox, those of us with widescreen TVs would have to zoom the entire episodes with the concomitent lost in quality. The CGI/composite material would not look noticeably better in that case than it does now, and the live action (which is 85% of the show) would look worse. Anything they did with the show in terms of widescreen was going to be a compromise, because they didn't have the foreknowledge, the technology, the time or the money to anticipate the best way to prep for an eventual widescreen release. But they always shot the show with such a release in mind, and - as JMS has said - always cheated towards the widescreen when there was a problem getting both versions composed for the same shot. I'm happy to have the meat of the series looking as good as it can. I never watched it for the FX anyway.
Regards,
Joe
* Being human, they screwed up sometimes. There is a single shot in both the R1 and R2 versions, lasting only a few seconds, where the 1.33:1 version is simply "stretched" horizontally because the composition made it impossible to crop. The shot comes in "Survivors" when Garibaldi is entering the casino to talk with Londo. As he crosses the room, at the back of the shot, there are some people playing a holographic fighting game in the foreground. Jerry Doyle's head is too close to the top of the frame to be cropped - you wouldn't be able to recognize him with the top of his head cut off, and you'd lose the character the scene is about. But they couldn't crop the bottom without losing that expensive holographic game shot. So they cheated.
