Unknown at this point. I'm recommending people contact Amazon to request them.
Babylon 5
- Thread starter Kail
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Unknown at this point. I'm recommending people contact Amazon to request them.
If lots of people watch it, Amazon will figure everyone is happy with the current state of the material and not spend the money. If no one watches it, they'll figure no one cares and not spend the money.
The reason it's exciting to have it available to stream on a major service is so that new viewers can find it without making an investment on something that may not be to their tastes and for folks who may remember it from the past to rediscover it. Quite a number of folks discovered/rediscovered it while it was on Go90 so I can imagine what will happen with Amazon Prime streaming.
The CGI wasn't even done in progressive. It was done in 480 interlace. So any film transfers would've been from 480i tapes.
I'm not sure that's technically possible. As I understand it, the CG was rendered in 24p fps to match the filmed live-action, and then telecined to 60i fps in the edit with everything else (the widescreen transfers support this; the rescanned film elements are at 24 fps on the DVD, but all the CG and crossfades and whatnot that were cropped from the broadcast versions plays back at 30 fps). If they were making film transfers (and we've well escaped my knowledge of 1990s video editing and film-to-TV-to-film technology and entered a realm of unsupported speculation), I'd imagine the film transfers were done from the 24 fps sources rather than detelecined video (and they'd have to be for this entire line of thought to make the slightest bit of sense; otherwise they'd just be prints of the SD DV masters which, presumably, WB has on tapes in a vault somewhere. Actually, they wouldn't even be necessary. At least one of the streaming services used the 4x3 version of the complete series, so that's already been digitized ages ago).
I expect that version is based on the original broadcast tapes digitised at SD resolution. Those would do to fill in the CGI and composited elements of the mooted HD rescan. However, I don't expect such a procedure to be carried out unless someone at Amazon controlling the purse strings is an ultrafan.
Creating new scans of all these episodes would be incredibly expensive, and Amazon has little incentive, because they do not own the show and wouldn't be able to amortize these costs by exploiting the show through other channels.
And even if they did have all rights, I'm skeptical they could do much business beyond breaking even.
I hope I'm wrong, though.
And even if they did have all rights, I'm skeptical they could do much business beyond breaking even.
I hope I'm wrong, though.
Wouldn't the only business case for Amazon be if a higher resolution version got a lot of people to sign up for Prime? That doesn't seem like a good bet. Warners would also retain the rights to any HD scan and they could undermine Amazon by selling the new version on Blu-ray. It seems extremely unlikely that Amazon will shell out for an HD scan. Warners almost certainly won't as they have demonstrated they're not prepared to invest anything in this property.
Plus, streaming is well suited to B5, because you can start episode 1 and don't have to worry about missing them. Babylon 5 is not a show you can just show up in the middle and get the whole experience. I know a lot of people complain about the first season but I always thought it was a great foundation for everything that followed. It's one of my 5 favorite seasons!
I think the trick is that creating new scans from these heretofore unknown film master edits isn't actually that expensive. Much less than doing the widescreen version of B5, or even TNG, since in both those cases, you have to go back to the original raw film and reedit the episodes after sorting through all that material (to say nothing of the visual effects), but in this case, the finished episodes would be ready to go. You'd only need to scan it directly, with no messy sorting and reconstruction of raw elements, and that happens all the time for old movies and TV shows with limited commercial appeal, so it can't be that expensive. I'm doing some quick googling, and it's difficult to find details (not in the least of which because I'm mostly finding stuff about scanning still photos and not movies), but it looks like, if these films are complete and ready to play as JMS says, the cost of digitizing them may be less than a thousand dollars an episode. Color-correction, clean up, and, for that matter, finding and transporting the reels would all add to that, but it's still a fraction of what a "proper" HD version of Babylon 5 in widescreen with redone (for whatever value of "redone" you care to use) VFX would cost.
Of course, it is more expensive than "free," which is what it'd cost to just use the 16x9 or 4x3 SD versions of the show that are already digitized and ready to go.
I work at an entertainment company that regularly licenses content from the studios and creates new film scans. For many projects, new scans are not in the cards financially, or are only profitable if we acquire all rights. Television shows only compound your costs, since the consumer isn't paying the same per hour for TV as they would for a film project.
And even when a company has all rights, sometimes there still isn't enough revenue to make the financials work. Look at all the classic TV shows that CBS started scanning in HD, but did not finish.
It is definitely cheaper than the TNG on HD project, but that doesn't mean it's cheap.
On the other hand, the costs of doing new HD scans has really come down over the years, so maybe there will be a point where it works?
I agree. Without many of those episodes we'd have lost many of the character moments that made us care enough that we missed them when they were gone (and cried at 'Sleeping in Light'). That and we saw parts of the life on the station that had nothing to do with the military (sports, unions) that made the place feel more like a city in space.
I was just looking on the B5 Scrolls web page, and the interviews for Paul Bryant, John Copeland and Ron Thornton (of Foundation imaging) say a couple of things about the CGI:
1. it was done at 4:3 720x486 --- so it would be D1 material at best (DV uses 720x480)
2. Ron Thornton talks about, had they gone widescreen for the CGI, more "anti-aliasing in the horizontal than vertical with the video" (http://www.b5scrolls.com/#Screen1_01_7) which, to me, sounds like he is talking about interlace video, rather than progressive. He also mentioned how "The Gathering" and the first season were hindered by the polygons on the Amiga and how later seasons had to conform to those limitations (also, as far as I can find out about the Video Toaster and Lightwave that they were using then, they were only capable working with 480i; as it is interlace is a form of video compression) . Plus the live-action scenes that required CGI were delivered all ready cropped to 4:3, and those would've been on interlace videotape. So those scenes would've been in 24 fps over 30 fps NTSC videotape. So for those scenes, why would they go progressive, when they would've been working with interlace to start with?
3.Both Ron and John talk about the CGI being delivered to Warner Brothers on Exobyte Data tapes that were later put into a DDR for post-production.
4. John Copeland (http://www.b5scrolls.com/#Screen1_09_3) mentions that the NTSC DVD's were created from the PAL widescreen masters that were created in the 1990's, and even back then some markets like Portugal were airing the show in widescreen, so the DVD's are just using versions that were slowed down to 24fps from 25 fps and then converted using the 3:2 pulldown for NTSC.
5. Paul Bryant also mentions that they were using a Abekas digital disk recorder to offload the CGI to the Exobyte, rather than using the traditional and more costly version of printing the CGI to film and then transcining it to videotape. At the time the Abekas had been designed mostly for sports replays and slo-mo stuff, not for going to theatrical movies.
So having the CGI done at 480 progressive in the early-90s for B5 was way out of the question, not only financially, but physically. They were concerned at making sure that it was done at broadcast quality for a very cheap price.
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Amiga pixels were rectangular. I had a drawing tablet for my A2000, and when I traced a drawing onto, say, Deluxe Paint, it always came out wider, and vertically squished. I can't recall the exact ratio. I've heard this is why Monogram's model kit of the Star Fury was inaccurate - they used a squished image to create the master.
That doesn't mean a thing, since NTSC/PAL/SECAM pixels are rectangular.
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