The series look spectacular in HD (except the pilot)with a few minor issues. The live action scenes were shot on 35mm with Super35 in mind for later 16:9 broadcasts in the future. The entire series was scanned, telecine from 24 frame to 60 fields and recorded onto D2 digital composite tape (480 interlaced) In the mastering process. The CGI shots were rendered in 480 line 30 progressive frames. The original broadcasts came from these D2 tapes in 4:3 format in 480i60.
Warner Home Video released Babylon 5 on VHS tape and Laserdisc with 2 episodes on each, 3 to 4 discs or tapes release every 2 to 4 months starting in December 1998 for $29.99 each (110 episodes total, $1650 for the entire set
. The Laserdisc releases are interesting because they have close enough bandwidth to D2 digital composite tape and therefore they are the nearest to the original broadcast quality. They also preserve the open matte 4:3 aspect ratio with 2ch LPCM lossless Dolby Surround soundtracks. Warner picked a weird order how these were released. The first and the last seasons were released in the first half of 1999 and the first several episodes of the second and fourth seasons were released in the second half of 1999. The remaining episodes of the second and fourth seasons, as well as the third season were expected to be released in 2000. Pioneer pulled the plug on Laserdiscs, ending the formats 22 year run in the US (Laserdiscs were continued to be released until late 2001 in Japan) therefore we never got the second, third and fourth seasons released in full (except in VHS).
Warner released Babylon 5 on DVD, one complete season package each, between 2002 and 2004. These were remastered from the 35mm film with Super35 process to be framed in 16:9 ratio. This was the intended aspect ratio of the director all along. He figured widescreen TVs would be more common in the 2000s. The live action scenes look slightly sharper than the Laserdiscs due to the slightly higher luma (brightness) and significantly higher chroma (color) resolution of the DVD technology. The CGI scenes were originally rendered in 480p30 in 4:3 full frame. For the DVDs, they were cropped and upscaled to 480i60 in 16:9. This caused these scenes to look distorted. So the DVDs had slight advantage over the Laserdisc in live action scenes but the Laserdiscs had the CGI shots much better.
Now with the HD releases, the live action scenes are re-scanned from the 35mm films in 1080p24. They are marked improvement from both the DVDs and the Laserdiscs. The Director’s intended aspect ratio is 16:9 (although the original broadcast was in 4:3). The HD versions are in 1.33:1 full screen. This might be a problem to some purist. I don’t mind it. The CGI effects were created in 480p30. This is the problem part. 30 progressive frames convert really nicely to 60 interlaced fields for the Laserdiscs and DVDs but can’t convert to 24 frames without dropping frames. So the CGI scenes on the HD versions will not have the best cinematic motion over the Laserdiscs or the DVDs. Since they are up-converted from 480P30, they won’t look much clearer than the Laserdiscs either.
As a conclusion, it might have been a better idea to encode these episodes in 1080i60. This way both the 24 frame film source material and 30 frame CGI segments would work without frame drops. Fortunately, all the CGI segments are seriously outdated on this show and no one will scrutinize them critically. Also, they only make up a few short scenes per episode.