I've bought an (almost) entire set of NTSC VHS tapes off Ebay, as well as a few Lasers. I'm curious if I can get some version off those tapes that's at least watchable.

I will have ALL available Laserdiscs by the end of June. I found a really nice guy on a B5 board who was willing to sell them.
For now I have a few I got off lddb and Ebay (which I'll probably sell again later), and I've done some tests with my own player (a CLD 1850). The transfers are solid, a little noisy though. I'm planing to do multiple captures later when I borrow the HLX.

The most interesting things I noticed were:

- Even this first-gen master had many of the film defects the later scan of the live-action-non-sfx footage, and there's dirt there too. They probably didn't do a wet-gate telecine or something.

- The framing as shown here

http://www.modeemi.fi/~leopold/Babylon5/DVD/Img/LiveHiResBoxes.jpeg

doesn't seem to be correct. The top and the bottom of the frame look as if they are exactly the same in both the 4:3 and the 16:9 versions. It's just "open-matte" to the sides. I'll try and get some screenshots up later to confirm this.

What this means is that a lot of the DVD footage could be used for a 4:3 reconstruction, it just needs some cleanup work.

I'm not sure, but they might have actually shot this on 2-perf Super35 to save money on film stock. If they did the actually size of the negative that is used is hardly bigger than a regular 16mm neg. The grain levels that look very 16mm sometimes would point to that too.

Hm, the pilot episode discussion is very interesting.

I have a PAL 4:3 fullscreen DVD with the ORIGINAL cut of The Gathering, and the funny thing is that I've been searching for a VERY long time for the special edition on DVD :-)

skyjedi2005 said:

The music was redone for the second version by the same musician who did the rest of the series? cannot remember his name off the top of my head.

Did the original pilot have a complete and different score by another composer and not released on CD, or was it temp music?

Stewart Copeland did the first score of the The Gathering. And that cut is available on amazon instant watch.

Babylon 5 is in orignal 4:3 on Netflix instant streaming, and looks really good to boot. However it's being taken off the service next week! Has anyone manged to make captures of the episodes there?

Very interested in a complete 4:3 set of B5.

It appears that iTunes has Babylon 5 in 4:3, however the quality leaves something to be desired:

Video is 640 x 480@29.97fps Mpeg4 (low complexity) at 1.5 Mbps - with audio as 128kbps AAC - total file size is approx 496 mb, and of course the whole bundle is wrapped up in DRM.

Was the netflix version any better ?

I'd be willing to willing to start doing LD rips, if I had someone else to share the burden. I have an okay LD player (up-market Pioneer CLD-99 clone), and fairly decent capture hardware.

Only the first season is 4:3 on iTunes, all the rest are 16:9.

I'm not sure what the video quality was on Netflix, but obviously it was SD.

Did some capture tests last night. 

In short: with a decent laserdisc player and capture card, median stacking is a waste of time.

The readout of final generation laserdisc players is generally giving you everything there is on the disc on the first pass, subsequent passes will just introduce horizontal timebase error that result in a subtle softening of the image.

Will post some screenshots from my first B5 capture within a week or two.

As vaguely promised previously first images from an LD cap of 1x03 'Midnight on the Firing Line'.

Will pull some screenshots from the Itunes version for comparison.

Here are some captures from the itunes version:

Captures from the PAL DVD.

A few comments: 

The Itunes captures look a lot better than the video does in motion, there is a lot of macroblocking and jaggy color gradients.

The laserdisc looks good in motion - but is the softest of the bunch.

The DVD image is actually pretty good. In terms of cropping - it takes a little of the top, a chunk off the bottom - and obviously adds a lot on the sides. There is a lot of dirt on the negative in places which is sometimes distracting.

Any thoughts ?

Asaki said:

Surely some of the more able members here could cook up an un-interlace/re-interlace AVIsynth script to replicate what this guy did?

http://www.modeemi.fi/~leopold/Babylon5/DVD/DVDTransfer.html#030421proof

It's nothing that challenging - the effects are just 30p. 

The real problem is that the live action is 24p, while the effects are 30p. This makes it difficult to produce a progressive video stream because the frame rate would need to vary shot to shot. 

I think this is possible in an MKV container, but I think you'd end having to put it together on a command line. 

DisgruntledFan said:

Asaki said:

Surely some of the more able members here could cook up an un-interlace/re-interlace AVIsynth script to replicate what this guy did?

http://www.modeemi.fi/~leopold/Babylon5/DVD/DVDTransfer.html#030421proof

It's nothing that challenging - the effects are just 30p. 

The real problem is that the live action is 24p, while the effects are 30p. This makes it difficult to produce a progressive video stream because the frame rate would need to vary shot to shot. 

I think this is possible in an MKV container, but I think you'd end having to put it together on a command line. 

The DVDs are a non-starter. The widescreen versions of the show were done on the cheap. Widescreen footage was spliced in where possible, everything else (CGI, composites, and live footage starting or ending with crossfades) is just 4:3 footage blown up and cropped. No script is going to fix that.

I've tried one of the episodes on iTunes, and the quality was shockingly awful. Unless someone knows how to do a rip from Netflix, the laser discs are probably the only option. 

You'll also want to avoid any PAL sources. B5 in PAL has always suffered from horrendous audio speed up issues that were not present when the show was originally transmitted outside the USA. No idea why. First time I bought one of the VHS tapes everyone sounded like they had a mouthful of helium, and the PAL DVD's are only marginally better. Not sure if there ever were PAL Laserdiscs of B5, but if so they probably have the same problem.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Asaki said:

maff said:

Unless someone knows how to do a rip from Netflix...

 I'm getting pretty confused here, now. I keep asking why it can't just be captured via 360-->capture card, and everyone keeps ignoring it and going on about how "There MUST be a way!" as if I had asked the most ridiculous question in the world...

I'm assuming that a) ripping a Netflix stream would give better results than simply recording one, and b) Netflix must implement some kind of technology to prevent recording streaming video. Then again, I'm in the UK and we don't get Netflix.

Not to mention that the show isn't on Netflix anymore. :(

I hope they add it back someday.