I wish they would do digital re-mastering of shows like Babylon 5 similar to what they did for Star Trek:TOS. There doesn't seem to be much point in streaming those shows or providing DVD's in crummy SD. I don't know if the cost to do so would be worth it to the content providers to do so but I'm sure that a lot of us sci-fi fans would like to see it done.
remaster old SD shows and movies
- Thread starter ZetaMale
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This should help you understand:
‘Babylon 5’ is great, so why does it look so bad?
You should also visit the link to the Finnish website that is in the story.
In summary, the CGI and composited stuff is all 640x400 (probably with overscanning to 704x484 - since that's what the Commodore Amiga was capable of producing) and that's not pretty when converted to 1920x1080 letterbox. Even if they re-rendered the CGI (pretty trivial if they still have the models and motion files), they would still have to deal with the composited material.
I think it was probably an error in judgment to try to letterbox the video. It would probably have been best to just leave it in 4:3 mode and skip HD altogether.
‘Babylon 5’ is great, so why does it look so bad?
You should also visit the link to the Finnish website that is in the story.
In summary, the CGI and composited stuff is all 640x400 (probably with overscanning to 704x484 - since that's what the Commodore Amiga was capable of producing) and that's not pretty when converted to 1920x1080 letterbox. Even if they re-rendered the CGI (pretty trivial if they still have the models and motion files), they would still have to deal with the composited material.
I think it was probably an error in judgment to try to letterbox the video. It would probably have been best to just leave it in 4:3 mode and skip HD altogether.
There is no cheap way to turn SD video into widescreen HD. Some other famous examples of Science Fiction of the day used film with models and we know that George Lucas wasn't happy about some of that being converted to HD. Netflix shows us that pan and scan conversion from SD video to HD is pretty awful. Truth be told, "after hours" programming on the movie channels demonstrates that pan and scan of HD video (to avoid the naughty bits) to HD is far from ideal.
I think the best you can hope for is to view a DVD on a good tube TV. Another option would be a DVD with a disc player or TV has good upconversion.
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