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Comment by RupertSalt | Hacker News Reader

The original episodes were all recorded in wide aspect ratio, even though they were destined for broadcast TV. They were touted as future compatibility. So the original broadcasts were "pan & scan". Then, when the wide-aspect disc formats arrived, it turned out that converting them was not a simple matter of going back to the originals and plopping them on disc.

https://b5remasterissues.wordpress.com/the-good/

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Only the live action shots were recorded with a wide aspect ratio, and perhaps not even that for the pilot. The CGI was rendered in 4:3 and the final cuts including transitions and VFX where composited in 4:3.

The remaster combines cropped 4:3 but high resolution scans of the original live action footage with (sometimes badly) upscaled versions of CGI and VFX'd shots -- except for the pilot which is fully upscaled and cropped from the original 4:3 broadcast masters with zero high resolution live action footage. I don't know if the pilot footage was actually shot widescreen but if it was then you don't get any of it in the "widescreen" pilot included in the remastered versions.

So just what is the optimal way to watch this show

There sadly isn't one. The 4:3 Blu-Ray remasters are about as good as it gets in visual quality, but there's a "cinematic" feel lost from the 16:9 DVDs, but the quality difference is noticeable and unfavorable. It's a bit of a dealer's choice at this point if you want "best available quality" or "best available widescreen."

Babylon 5 was filmed at a weird moment where they were prescient about HD TV and the coming widescreen home television boom and planned for/shot for 16:9 releases, but also had to shoot and composite first and foremost for 4:3 to meet TVs where they were. They had even had plans to preserve the special FX masters to make it easier to recomposite the show. WB's Archives team lost those files at some point. (The general story is WB Archives sent a copy of the masters to Vivendi [Sierra, proto-Activision Blizzard] for the eventually cancelled videogame and discovered they sent the original copy by accident only after Vivendi claimed to have wiped their copy out of respect for the contract terms when the game was cancelled.)

14⋮9 was used for a while to ease the transition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14%3A9_aspect_ratio

So the version here on youtube is a 16:9 widescreen crop of a 4:3 TV crop of the original 16:9 filming? And the remaining CGI are only the 4:3 crop from the lost 16:9 originals? Did I understand corectly?

Then, is there a version somewhere with original uncropped 16:9 live action and 4:3 CGI? I can tolerate side bars. To me, seeing the complete video frame is more important than a consistent frame format.

The original filming was apparently Super 35 [0][1] which is neither 16:9 nor 4:3 but is often cropped to either or both. The show was framed while they were filming it so that they could use the full 16:9 crop (for "cinematic effect"), but the effects were often only composited for the 4:3 crop. (A special few apparently had a chance to be done at the full Super 35 frame, but budget stopped them from doing that with every effects shot.)

So yeah the 16:9 crop we did get in the 90s (on TNT on cable and then on DVD) was cropped further from the 4:3 crop, but it mostly worked because the previous framing for the "full" Super 35 16:9 crop allowed for it.

Reviewing the helpful Wikipedia diagrams, the 4:3 crop actually uses more overall "volume" of the Super 35 frame than the best 16:9 crop, so I think I appreciate the 4:3 version we have a bit better.

I also found this useful visual comparison of the two crops that we have today: https://www.engadget.com/babylon-5-original-4-3-ratio-video-...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_35

[1] https://www.b5tv.com/threads/explain-the-widescreen-issue-to...

> So the version here on youtube is a 16:9 widescreen crop of a 4:3 TV crop of the original 16:9 filming?

Only for the pilot (The Gathering), the rest seem to be from the 4:3 remaster which is probably the best version - so both same as the Blu Ray and streaming versions.

> The 4:3 Blu-Ray remasters are about as good as it gets in visual quality, but there's a "cinematic" feel lost from the 16:9 DVDs, but the quality difference is noticeable and unfavorable.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here. What's wrong with the quality difference?

If I recall correctly, the DVDs are 480p. They were very early DVDs and tried to squeeze a bunch of episodes on each disk plus commentary on every episode.

The quality jump from 480p to 4K is a big one.

With an AI filter overlay of the cgi sequences?

Take it from someone who saw it when it first aired on standard definition analogue TV: it doesn't really matter all that much. The performance of the actors and the story is what's important!

That’s fair but from what I understand, inaccurate ratios could hide a lot of crucial detail

https://www.insidehook.com/television/seinfeld-netflix-aspec...

DS9 and Voy have the same issue. For DS9, Season 1 was shot wide screen compatible then they switched to 16:9 but none of the effects are widescreen ready.

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