Originally Posted by Fans of J. Michael Straczynski
It's not so much that the CGI masters were destroyed...it's that they were rendered at a standard aspect ratio for TVs at the time. The show was shot on what was essentially widescreen (the first TV series to do so, if I recall) but the tech wasn't there to produce the CGI in the same aspect ratio. (This was something I didn't actually know or realize at the time; I assumed it was being rendered wide.)
So the only way to integrate the CGI with the wider-aspect DVD release was to blow it up and crop, which was a far from satisfactory solution. It would be pretty much impossible to go back and try to re-render every single shot in widescreen, even now, to make this work.
The only way you could do it would be to do what they did in ST, which was to render all new EFX. The problem we'd have is that while an average ep of the original Trek had maybe a dozen or two effects shots in an episode, we had anywhere from 30 to, in a few extreme cases, a hundred shots in a single episode, many of which were composites using both live-action and blue-screen elements. So it would cost several times more to create new CGI for B5 than it cost for ST (which only had three seasons, vs. our five, which on its own would nearly double the cost even if our efx were no more than theirs.)
So I think, barring a miracle, that it's a dead issue.
