Just looked at the prices. Nope, not affordable, sad to say.
Could we maybe get one of those picture quality AIs I keep reading about to enhance the original CGI shots for a HD release?
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Unfortunately, I don’t think we will ever be seeing a HD release of Bab5.
- The aformentioned CGI was only ever rendered for lower resolutions. It could be re-done, but at a cost
- Many of the masters have been damaged and not stored properly. Look to the season 1 DVD release for examples of how bad it is out there.
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And that is why we need a neural net to understand what is pictured in the renders and recreate it at a higher resolution. A human could in theory do it frame by frame, so I guess in not that far fetched that a AI could do it.
I’m not saying it is happening right now, but the examples shown on various BB posts are encouraging. No hurry, I’ve got a few decades probably until full blown dementia.
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No, the money isn’t there. Star Trek got a redo on the special effects because it’s star trek. The audience for B5 is a fraction of the size. WHich means lower sales and thus not enough profit for redoing the effects.
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According to JMS, Internal politics at the studio are keeping Warner Brothers from doing anything with B5. They won’t release it to another studio, and they aren’t going to do anything with it themselves. Wait for the current set of
petulant babiesmen in suits to retire, and maybe something will happen. But not before.
- Having seen the redone effects for Star Trek TOS, I think it’s actually better that we satisfy ourselves with the current low res version. Yeah, you might hope we’ll get this:
But what if instead we get this:
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Wow! While I like the show and know people that worked on B5 … What does this get me that I can’t just learn from hitting some B5 wiki or something?
Or should I just put it like this:
A pair of really heavy books, suitable for braining any Drakh who come to take you away.
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Print books like this are collectible.At least for obsessed fans.
My friends and I started re-watching B5 together, one episode a week. We’re up to episode 15 of season 1. This is going to take a while. But for one of us this is the first time he’s seen it.
In the case of Foundation Imaging’s CG, you are looking at the original images, in SD.
Even if said AI improves upon this to some lower level of acceptability for production standard, I suspect @Glaurung (the most magical of Tolkien’s dragons), is still right: the audience isn’t there to justifiy even that level of effort.
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Me! I love print. I’ve got a lot of books, and this was on the air during my twenties and I’ve fond memories of trying hard to scrape up a TV and a VCR to watch the latest, taped episode via friends.
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In the case of Foundation Imaging’s CG, you are looking at the original images, in SD.
It was a bit of a mess that when Netter Digital ripped away the show from Foundation Ron send them all the asset files with the filenames truncated to 8.3.
It was probably hell from them to get anything loaded. I bet nobody would have a working versions of the original scene files to re-render.
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Bought it and man is that a terrible website.
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B5 was possibly the first show that had a wiki-equiv tech.
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/
Oh, and plus the news group.
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I’m waiting for the tech to became ubiquitous (like upscalers) so that some fan can do it. You can still get the fan-made upscaled and otherwise improved versions of the DVD release. Of course they do nothing for the CGI and composite shots, but other scenes are somewhat improved on average.
Of course I would prefer the TNG type studio effort…
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And a show producer who took the time to communicate with fans along the way. I remember many a conversation I had with JMS on usenet.
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Considering what they were rendered on (IIRC, Amiga 4000s with video toasters and Lightwave), SD was about the best that could be done without spending gargantuan sums on the CG; Paramount had a mountain of cash to burn for TNG’s effects, and Trek is popular enough that they had another mountain of cash to re-render the effects for HD.
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This is telling Buddha he needs to stay out of the road, but yeah.
I don’t know. I think it’s worth asking why it’s even necessary. A lot of folk talk about this stuff as though it’s inevitable or up there on their want list, but why? Nobody asks for the VFX in the 1960s Outer Limits show to be upscaled to HD. Or Lost In Space or most of the shows from the 1980s. In that sense, Star Trek is an exception in that anyone is even bothering—but even there I’d argue it doesn’t actually make the show any more watchable to do things like recapture widescreen or convert to HD. It’s not going to improve any of the bad episodes, and it’s not going to do any favors for the good ones.
B5 was broadcast at a time when the tech was in flux, and they tried their best to stay ahead of the curve, but I can’t fault them for not having perfect foresight. I saw it on VHS, mostly, dubbed from TV int he old 4:3 aspect ratio—usually with a VCR attached via RF, to boot. Moving to DVDs was a marked improvement, but not much more so than any show transferred from quarter-inch tape masters.
I’d never even heard that. Wonder if they delivered on ISO9660 CDRs without the Rockridge extensions or something. I presume ND was on NT at the time, so longer filenames shouldn’t have been a problem.
nods I might have a bit of a soft spot for the show, and you can pry my rose tinted glasses from my my cold, dead hands. 
In the 90’s the Video Toaster was the shizznitz, in that it brought video production down to the level of ‘well heeled mere mortal’ level; my high school had one, for example, which was pretty rare. the IBM compatibles were just starting to get the 3d accelerators (3dfx, anyone?), and macs were still largely used for photo manipulation and desktop publishing. the toaster was, IIRC, the best genlock you could buy without needing a suitcase full of hundred dollar bills to get studio grade gear. the local cable company had one that ran their ‘community news and information’ channel (think a scrolling text display) for years. I know it ran on a toaster, because me and a friend caught it one morning when it had bombed, and saw the infamous ‘guru meditation’ screen.
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