VFX, Amiga and Babylon 5 [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn3UraChY0c&feature=youtu.be

by doener • 7 years ago

142 104 7 years ago

apostacy• 7 years ago

JMS, the creator of this show, was way ahead of his time, and did some amazing tricks to get this show produced.

He drew heavily from technology culture, and found innovative ways to save money on production.

He was able to get consultation from the NASA JPL (and credited them), and he pioneered early CGI; season 1 supposedly built a rendering cluster out of 486 computers.

Another way this show was trailblazing was that it was the first network television show shot in 16:9.

You can read more about it on the Lurker's Guide[1] (That is a usenet reference), which contains excerpts from the newsgroups where he gave feedback to fans after each episode.

[1] http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/

AdamJacobMuller2• 7 years ago

The original Babylon 5 script books are amazing as well.

https://b5books.com/babylon-5-scripts-overview/

They contain all of the original scripts for every episode (in some cases multiple versions) as well as commentary written by JMS about both what is going on on-screen and off-screen. They have some really detailed information on the challenges he faced running this show in an exceedingly raw and real fashion. Sadly, they are only available in print and are very expensive.

http://jmsnews.com has complete archives of all of JMS's usenet postings, which span the entire period the show was on the air (as well as many years before/after). Again, some of this is very raw, like where he discusses the feature film due to be announced "in a few days" about the telepath war (which we never got :().

Anyway, revealed myself to be a huge B5 nerd here, but, I do believe it was in a number of ways one of the most visionary TV shows on air at the time, highly serialized plots 5 years before the sopranos and computer VFX that movies couldn't touch at the time.

Diederich3• 7 years ago

Huge B5 fan here as well, watched them all (multiple times) as they came out.

Honest question: does anyone know of any TV series that had a firm, 5 (or multi-year) arc planned out in detail years before any filming began?

Babylon 5 got funded when JMS described, in detail, the last scene of the last episode in the last season.

There were flash forward scenes in season 2 that took place in season 4. Two years later, they meshed together perfectly.

Has any other show been like that? I'd love to know. (:

mcguire4• 7 years ago

I've recently been re-watching the show, and it stands up pretty well, especially the VFX. The two weaknesses I've noticed are the look (which is often dated to the '90s) and (ahem) JMS' writing. The plots are good, and stand against ST-TOS as actual science fiction, unlike many other SF shows, but the actual writing...well, yeah.

Speaking of ST-TOS, B5 doesn't look too bad compared to the remastered (!) ST on Netflix.

WorldMaker5• 7 years ago

More than just being the first shot in 16:9, it was the first network show shot targeting HD television, before the networks fully agreed on what HD would be. It just never got the final HD treatment that it should have.

It's still a huge shame that Warner Brothers supposedly lost all the digital originals for the special effects shots, because they should have easily had a chance to recompose the show for true DVD quality and then again for a decent Blu-Ray rerelease. Some alternate universe has amazing Babylon 5 remasters today on Blu-Ray versus the letterboxed no-worse-than-SD DVD copies ours is left with.

(Another weird twist to the story here is that one tale has it that Warner Brothers blames French company Vivendi for losing the digital SFX archives, which WB loaned to Vivendi for a B5 game under development under the old Sierra games brand that was eventually cancelled. Which also isn't the only property that WB seems to have "lost" to Vivendi, as WB should probably be the owner of the No One Lives Forever videogame IP, by way of buying developer Monolith into WB Games, but Vivendi lost the publishing contract somewhere and no one seems to know in this timeline if WB actually does own it or not.)

CharlesColeman• 7 years ago

because they should have easily had a chance to recompose the show for true DVD quality and then again for a decent Blu-Ray rerelease.

IIRC, that was the actual plan from the beginning: render for SD TV in the 90s, then re-render when HD TV became common and computer power increased enough for it to be practical to render at those definitions.

sp332• 7 years ago

I thought they didn't go with 16:9 for the remaster because all the shots had to be framed for 4:3 for TV, and it was awkward having a bunch of "empty space" around the wider frame. But hey if 4:3 is good enough for The Maltese Falcon, it's good enough for me.

diggernet2• 7 years ago

Wait, you said "digital". That means super easy to copy. The only way Vivendi could have "lost all the digital originals" is if only one physical copy existed (no backups??) and Warner simply handed that over to them instead of making them a copy. There is absolutely no way Vivendi can be blamed for that level of WTF negligence from Warner. It would be completely reasonable for anyone at Vivendi to simply assume that any media they got from Warner was just one copy of many, and had no intrinsic value.

KVFinn• 7 years ago

It's still a huge shame that Warner Brothers supposedly lost all the digital originals for the special effects shots

There are a bunch floating around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHAuK_lDkk0

You’ve possibly read or been told all the original CGI files were lost . . . . Well, no, they haven’t – though some may be lost by this point while others are buried pretty deep - plenty do still exist. For the best part of 10 years I’ve been sitting on a whole pile of Lightwave 3D models and scene files which someone who will remain nameless arranged for me to receive. Those are frame for frame renders of the original shots - using the original models and textures which haven't been updated in any way other than rendered out at 1920x1080.

Rebelgecko• 7 years ago

Is 486 the quantity or the type of CPU used?

baldfat3• 7 years ago

My church bought a Amiga 2000 and a Video Toaster because as a teenager they trusted me to get what they needed. It was there till 2004. :) I loved that machine.

DoofusOfDeath• 7 years ago

Did the church actually have a use for that system?

trentlott• 7 years ago

Well, he was apparently a member of the church - so, yes! And it was probably bordered on lust in the classical sense (and, more accurately, in the modern one).

baldfat3• 7 years ago

Yes they had a tv show on the local channel and we use it for adding to the video and credits.

We then were one of the first video projectors and we used that for the projector.

PhasmaFelis• 7 years ago

It sounds like you're saying their trust was misplaced?

baldfat3• 7 years ago

We actually got a ton of use from it. We use to broadcast the Sunday morning service and it did all the graphics. Anything else would have cost $10,000 more.

mcguire4• 7 years ago

The narrator voice is synthetic?

NeedMoreTea4• 7 years ago

Sounds like he added some sort of filter on top of regular voice to sound like synthetic. It seems better than any synth I've heard. It's definitely not Amiga's translator library. :)

Kinda weird and annoying.

diggernet2• 7 years ago

It's definitely synthetic. There are a few phrases which are clearly spoken other than how a human would. But yes, one of the best synths I've heard. And also very annoying.

dmitrybrant• 7 years ago

It's a complete mystery to me why certain YouTubers do this. I'll take the worst human voice (even Fran Drescher or Rich Evans) over a synthesized one, particularly for expository narration. It reminds me of phishing phone calls, and instantly draws me away from the actual content.

amiga-workbench• 7 years ago

There is nothing wrong with Rich Evans voice.

bootcode• 7 years ago

A guess would be quicker production process. If you adjust the script, just rerender it and done. Actually speaking and recording takes tons of time.

jccalhoun2• 7 years ago

I would guess that a lot of them are not native speakers of english?

philistine• 7 years ago

You take back your disparaging comments against the sweet wonderful voice of Rich Evans. His angelic laugh is soothing enough to stop babies from crying.

djmips2• 7 years ago

My theory is that this video was put together from footage found in another documentary (it's cropped funny like they are cropping out the original footage watermark). My next guess is the author doesn't speak English as a first language so they use a voice synth?

cromwellian7• 7 years ago

Wow, I'll have to add this to my set of "how can I show people, especially my Apple zealot friends who obsess about the original Mac 128k, just how advanced the Amiga was" videos. This video, is one of my favorites (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7rKj0DU8Xs), it shows just how advanced the Amiga was in 1985, let alone after 1987 when the 2000 was introduced.

I learned to code on a Vic-20 and C64 (basic and assembly), but the Amiga was my first exposure to C, and LaTeX, and 3D modeling / video editing. I grew up relatively poor in Baltimore City, and this was an astonishing amount of capability for something so affordable. (I also learned soldering because I only had 512k of chip ram on my A500, and Commodore's official RAM upgrade was too expensive, so I bought my own RAM chips and soldered them directly to the mainboard)

I have an unlimited amount of nostalgia for this machine (and Babylon-5!)

jacobush2• 7 years ago

You are my soulmate.

spullara• 7 years ago

Literally the same progression as me.

cromwellian7• 7 years ago

If you're interested in C64 stuff, here's a video I made of some old C64 intros I wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aViXXbUg_yU

NeedMoreTea4• 7 years ago

Nice nostalgia trip you linked, only missing Super Hang On really - so close to the arcade, awful on every other platform.

XCopy. whistles innocently

cromwellian7• 7 years ago

I was addicted to Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe for awhile.

But truly, one of the greatest early games was Fairy Tale Adventure which came out in 1987.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5_4DhXWdwo

cromwellian7• 7 years ago

This is another one of my favorites, the JobsNote-like launch of the Amiga https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3x00Pbs2K8

Compare this to the 1984 launch of the Mac which cost $2485 MSRP, all of these capabilities came for only $1285 ($1595 with monitor), or the A500 ($699 MSRP)

As you can tell, I'm still bitter and annoyed at how Commodore mismanaged and squandered the marketing and sales of this machine. The Amiga was so advanced, it wasn't until PCs arrived with SuperVGA cards and SoundBlaster audio that I was enticed to leave the Amiga platform. The Mac128k at school seemed like a toy in comparison to my Amiga and what it could do, but somehow all of the media attention was on it. It's as if someone launched an iPhone in 1985, and no one cared.

NeedMoreTea4• 7 years ago

It's as if someone launched an iPhone in 1985, and no one cared

Commodore had no clue what to do with it. It's like Apple launched iPhone, then Jobs spent the rest of the marketing budget on a yacht then told engineering to make everything cheaper. Eventually Gould and Ali were on 3x what the CEO of IBM got in the same years.

Tucked away somewhere, I still have the 1985 issue of UK's PCW (the serious magazine, comparable to Byte) when the A1000 was first reviewed. Something like 15 pages of glowing praise and how nothing else is in the same universe, it'll change the world, etc. They barely touched an Amiga ever again.

sys_647382• 7 years ago

I used AMAX II with my Amiga 500 to run Mac programs while at College. That was an example of how brilliant it was given the native speed of the Mac under emulation.

The Amiga platform is an era which I wouldn't trade for anything. I feel sad for people who didn't have the opportunity to experience and live it first hand.

gdubs2• 7 years ago

I was obsessed with the Amiga, and also a huge fan of the Mac. Couldn’t afford either. But I think the reason the Mac resonated in such an enormous way was a) because Steve Jobs was a master of media manipulation, but also b) because the Mac turned the computer into an appliance. It showed that computers weren’t these difficult scary things, and that they were approachable to everyone.

tambourine_man3• 7 years ago

The Amiga was years ahead. When I saw the Debbie Harry portrait by Andy Warhol I was mesmerized.

But the thing about the original Mac, to me at least, was the finesse, good taste, personality and coherence of the whole thing.

I didn’t have that feeling again until I saw BeOS and later the original iPhone.

cromwellian7• 7 years ago

True to some extent, but it also was crippled by low RAM, a tiny screen, bad performance. The Amiga lacked coherence, but Amiga applications and games could do so much more with the exception of perhaps DTP (but a LaserWriter was out of the price range of most people)

Far more people learned to hack and code and be creative on platforms like the Apple 2 or C64 and Amiga (or Atari ST) than they did on the 1984 Mac, it was way too limited and on-rails (and expensive!)

I did DTP on the Amiga, for example, by using LaTeX to do all of my work in college, produce postscript files with dvi2ps and then taking the files to my college lab and printing them on expensive printers. A $500 Amiga was producing reports with AMSTeX or LaTeX that looked like they were professionally typeset by a $5000 Mac setup (in 2018 dollars)

Torwald• 7 years ago

Don't forget to talk about preemptive multitasking.

icelancer• 7 years ago

FLATLINE by Ahoy is a must-watch about the Amiga's start and how it languished due to poor business decisions and bad luck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ

thinkingkong2• 7 years ago

I feel like we're still in the uncanny valley for voice synthesis for this type of narration. It's good but just bad enough for people to be unforgiving and have it feel creepy.

mortenjorck• 7 years ago

It took me perhaps an entire minute before I realized something was strange about the voiceover and that it was synthesized, which, in my view, is quite impressive. Once I realized it was generated, though, I became much more attuned to the pitch-shifting artifacts, slight cadence irregularities, and cultural misses (like emphasizing the second syllable of "recall" in the title of the movie Total Recall).

Still, a few more years of progress on neural nets (can GANs be applied to vocal cadence and intonation?) and I won't envy the position of mid-tier voiceover artists.

jccalhoun2• 7 years ago

I couldn't watch the whole video because the audio was so bad. Of course I already knew most of what it was talking about so I don't think that helped.

thinkingkong2• 7 years ago

Fun Video Toaster fact: The founder of the company Tim Jenison[1] is the same guy that made the documentary 'Tims Vermeer' which if you haven't seen, is absolutely awesome.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewTek#Tim_Jenison

dreamcompiler• 7 years ago

True. Another one: The engineer who built the first Toaster for NewTek was Brad Carvey, Dana Carvey's brother. The "Garth" character Dana plays on Wayne's World is Dana's impression of Brad.

gdubs2• 7 years ago

And I think Garth wears a video toaster t shirt in Wayne’s World 2.

Flenser• 7 years ago

No way!

harel• 7 years ago

I've posted this before, but this is my go-to Amiga story to demonstrate how amazing this was at the time where PC was the inferior alpha computer: My dad was a graphic designer/print shop and he was building the panels for an F-16 fighter jet simulator, built by a private company for the Israeli Air Force in the 90s. One saturday he took 14 year old Amiga fanatic me to the company HQ and I had a go flying an F-16 inside a real cockpit, 180 deg. screen, amazing out of this world 3D graphics. The whole shebang. That part was amazing as it is. However, what really blew me away was first getting a demo of the $250K SGI they had to run the whole thing, and then the real nuclear was the next room filled with tens of Amiga workstations they used to actually generate all the visuals and graphic models. Considering just around that time I tried those 90s first attempt virtual reality arcades, which were powered by Amigas but were quite shit because it was the 90s and not some oculus magic, seeing and flying that simulator was an out of body experience for 14 year old me. I can't express what the Amiga gave me in words. It showed me the future before i had to go back into the past and wait until it caught up.

philwelch6• 7 years ago

Babylon 5 really opened the door to using this much CGI on a weekly show. Star Trek TNG and DS9 really didn't embrace it for a long time, even after B5 came out. It wasn't until the sixth season of DS9 that a major CGI effects sequence was used in Star Trek (though individual CGI assets were used prior to this): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoIFUJxJwcQ

yuchi• 7 years ago

My first exposure to computers was an A1200 — which my father bought in 1994. Now that I have a son, I’m desperately in search for something that could influence him as much as that Amiga did to me.

Seriously, what is the Amiga of the current market? What is that product that fosters creativity and is so futurist?

peterashford• 7 years ago

There isn't one. What made the Amiga great was that it was a technically amazing machine that hobbyists could actually use and do great things with. The equivalent today would be Sony allowing completely open use of the PS4 and letting anyone make anything for it that they wished. It wouldn't happen: companies today like their walled gardens. The Amiga flourished by being open.

VFX, Amiga and Babylon 5 [video]

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