However they anticipated TV was moving towards widescreen, and the show was shot in 16:9 widescreen.īabylon 5 was also on the forefront of using computer graphics (CG), not only for space scenes, but also frequently composited with live action. Backgroundīabylon 5 was made in the 1990s before the era of widescreen and high definition TV. This article reviews and compares the “remastered” version from what was previously available on digital services, which I describe as the “widescreen” version. There is an official comparison video available here, however I found it was difficult to directly compare the quality improvements, and it did not show what was being lost by losing the widescreen. Perhaps 2020 will be most remembered for a “remastered” version of Babylon 5 starting to appear on digital platforms. Original story, with a few edits, appears below: It almost works with comparing SD frames because the SD frames are also small, but it resizes HD frames to the point they become indistinguishable from SD frames. That said it is difficult to get Medium to do the comparison of video frames justice - medium resizes the images to be a consistent height.
Over the next few weeks, I intend to update this article showing the improvements aparent in the HD remastered version. It arguably looks as good as it could without recreating all of the CG scenes. The process was outlined in this article by Engadget. For scenes with CG, it is stuck with a lower resolution, but this video was “algorithmically” scaled up, and looks great. For non-CG scenes the film was scanned at 4k.
Subsequently, the high definition ( HD) version of Babylon 5 has been released, and this version is astounding. This version was a significant improvement over what had been available for a long time, but was not earth shattering. Update 3 February 2021: This article was originally written when only the standard definition ( SD) version of the Babylon 5 remastered was available.