So I’ve been watching a few episodes from all over the series on iTunes to see how they look. “The Gathering” is in widescreen; overall it’s softer than the Blu-Ray, and more grainy—-but the grain looks like SD videotape grain, however the video colors look more solid, like the video had been transferred from film vs the DVD colors that have pixel smear in them (I.e red pixels smear into blue lines.). And the titles appeared sharper, and the blue of the shadow part looked overly bright, whereas the original has a navy blue shadow. Also I was noticing that at times the actors faces would get that pasty waxed look to them, as if someone had applied a lot of digital noise reduction to particular scenes to smooth out imperfections. Plus, for some odd reason, all the CGI seemed to be jerky in this episode, as if it were missing frames (were they using the PAL converted CGI—-the CGI was originally done in NTSC’s 30 frames-per-second, and then for the PAL 4:3 and 16:9 masters in the 90’s were converted to 25 frames-per-second—-but this jerkiness was not present on the DVD’s, which were mastered from the PAL 16;9 tapes, as no NTSC 16:9 masters had been made in the 90’s).
I then watched “Soul Hunters”. This one looks like it was rescanned from film, in 4:3, as it was very sharp, but again the titles appear to have been recreated and someone appeared to brighten all the colors, as the NTSC 4:3 VHS that I have is darker, and the titles have a navy blue shadow on them. Again, it looks like heavy DNR was used, as they actors have that pasty wax look to their faces.
I then jumped forward to the episode where Sheridan is held in that cell after Garibaldi betrays him. (I can’t think of the name.). Boy, this episode is in 4:3 but it looks like they just rescanned the 90’s NTSC Digital Betacam master. There was a lot of tape grain, which I didn’t see in “Soul Hunters”, or even “Midnight on the Firing Line”, which suggests that Warner Brothers maybe did a rescan of half the film and then cheaped out and reused the 90’s videotapes for the last half of the series. The live-action video quality was slightly softer than the DVD’s video quality, and a few instances (like the bridge of the White Star in the prior episode and Lennier’s rounded station looked quite jagged as if they only did a software deinterlace rather than a full scan from film in a true progressive scan.Overall, Warner’s B5 remaster is all over the place for video quality.
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