alt Hacker NewsI'd be delighted to spend that for a Blu-ray of the series but I'm afraid of getting the mangled version that they released on DVD.
For background, JMS knew the widescreen transition was coming so filmed everything in 16:9. As he put it at the time, it didn't really cost more, you just had to pay more attention to lighting at the wings. All CGI was done in 4:3 because it was thought to be easy to rerender in the future. Alas, the digital assets were not preserved properly and when the time came for DVD, nobody wanted to pay for more work. There may be places where they used the 16:9 masters, but anyplace where there was CGI, particularly where they were compositing over live action, basically chopped the top and bottom of the 4:3 resulting in a sub-VGA mess.
It made everyone weep.
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The CGI was preserved well enough for the fans who got access to some of it to re-render it in HD and upload to YouTube [0]. If WB cared even a little, fully CGI-rendered scenes could have been remastered relatively easily. The only scenes that are truly un-recoverable without redoing from scratch are those composited ones.
But like the others said, the BDs are fine, by far the best the series has ever looked, even if the difference between the crisp live action and the blurry upscaled CGI is rather jarring.
I watched a chunk of the version on Tubi which I believe was the same as the BluRay, and I thought it looked great. They just do the whole thing in 4:3 which is maybe not the ideal solution to the problem but is seamless. CGI shots are obviously upscaled but it looks good enough not to intrude.
You know, AI might actually be able to fix this!
Blu-ray version is definitely not perfect but I wouldn't call it mangled. It is presented in 4:3 which might be an issue for some viewers but it is absolutely the best this show has ever looked: https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Babylon-5-The-Complete-Series...