</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
Was Crusade filmed in widescreen format like B5 was?
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Sort of. Like B5, Crusade was filmed in Super35, which isn't quite the same thing as being "filmed in widescreen." It hasn't been shown that way because widescreen masters were never created from the original film, and the widescreen masters were never created because that process costs money and nobody had a financial incentive to do it.
With B5 the Sci-Fi Channel had a double incentive: The show had already been rerun several times, and they wanted to offer something "new". Also TNT had gone out of its way to run the entire series one more time before the rights changed hands, airing it six days a week after showing it only once a week (at 6 AM on Saturdays) for nearly a year. The aim was to cut into Sci-Fi's ratings. Warner Bros., in turn, had its own incentives. They would make Sci-Fi happy, and they wanted to build a relationship with them for other shows and original programs. They knew that there was great interest in a widescreen version for the eventual DVD release. They had always planned on making a widescreen version available when HDTV became common, and would have to bite the bullet eventually. There was also the chance that someone else would pick up the rights after Sci-Fi's contract ran out and they might want to show it in widescreen. Creating new hi-def masters in 2000 let them kill three birds with one stone, since the same masters could then be downconverted for NTSC broadcast, DVD (NTSC and PAL) and used "as is" for HDTV and even HD-DVD, when that eventually arrived.
There were no similar reasons for remastering Crusade. The show had only aired once, on TNT, so there was no need to sell a "new" version to the audience. Warner Bros. had nowhere to sell a 13-episode cancelled SF series except the Sci-Fi Channel, so there were no other markets to consider. If they released Crusade on DVD at all it wouldn't be until after they finished B5 and had seen how the parent series did, which was years in the future. So there was no rush. Nobody saw any good reason to spend the money.
If B5 does well on DVD and Warner Bros. follows up with Crusade they probably will go ahead and remaster it at that point, but not before. At least they won't have to pay to upgrade the sound to DD 5.1. That's how the show was originally mixed before being down-converted to Dolby Surround for broadcast. /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
Regards,
Joe
