KarpowSCX Imagine if they would have continued to evolve and be in business. Back then Amiga was #1 when it came to graphics, then the somewhat distant Atari ST #2, and extremely distant PC #3. It was not competition to be honest.
even though the technology primitive it does look solid esp for it's time. They are right, CGI is good depending on the filmmaker, artist, designer behind it.
From what i have read from various sources,the Amiga hardware and video toaster was only involved in the pilot in 1993,seasons 1-3 were made on Pentium PC's with the lightwave software,i was under the impression until a few years ago that all the 5 seasons of B5 were made on at least a mix of Amigas and PCs,the Amiga was central to B5's beginnings but the software is what really powered the CGI rather than the actual hardware.
I'm curious as a CGI artist. How did the Amiga store it's rendered images, then composite CG video between or into live-action shots? Hard disk space and access speeds where.. well, marginal to put it mildly. (even on the Amiga) The Amiga Toaster still used external Analogue sources as best I am aware. So are they compositing image to image, or within images?
Some of the composting was done in the 3d program, Lightwave. you could bring in an image sequence and map it onto a polygon. For output a PAR card (personal Animation Recorder) was used. It would read the image sequence from a hard drive and play it back. Keep in mind we are only talking about 720 X 486 resolution back then. Before that you had to have the computer hooked up to a Video deck that could record one frame at a time. The deck would do a 2 minutes pre-roll, record the frame, roll back two minutes, record the frame, etc etc. Between rendering and recording it could take days to get a animation recorded.
Personally [and this's as a DS9'er] I think the VFX Studio for B5 did a commendable job, especially for a time when 3D Animation was only just taking off in children's programming with *Insektors*, *Reboot* & *Beast Wars* . (some of that being years after B5 debuted) Same studio that did B5's VFX would go on to do *Max Steel* , a rather innovative series in its own right... unlike the hideous reboot it got in recent years. Where B5 looks less good today IMO is the sets & costuming, which sadly can't be fixed by a remastered edition. DS9 did have costuming issues to a point in S1, but overall looks a lot better in retrospect, despite having no remaster as of 2021 (and Trek post-2005 having dreadful IP owners and... well everything 😒).
***** Not only that but the CPUs of the time were based on extremely simplistic architectures. For example a Single Core G3258 clocked @1GHz from today would outpace a 4GHz Pentium 4. CGI isn't so much about the CPU power it's how long the system takes to render everything. What took a 2 weeks to render in the late 80's might take 30 seconds today. Barring storage constraints you could still do photo realistic rendering in that era, it'd literally just take forever.
+Louis Cyfear Only the pilot movie and the first season used A4000 machines, mostly 68040/40. Foundation Imaging switched to Pentiums and DEC Alphas at the beginning of season 2. Later seasons also made use of SGI hardware, mainly O2 workstations. Composing/editing was, for the most part, done on Power Macs.
everyone here is talking how " it aged poorly" or "it was bad even for the time" i mean sure, the visual effects like lasers and lighting on footage was not good, that's a given. but when comes to the full cgi shots, the real issue was not the CGI itself. if you look on youtube you gonna see renders of original CGI scenes in HD resolution and holy shit. just check it out yourself. most of the visual issues was when they had to mix the filmed footage and the cgi footage in a single thing that could be broadcasted. that's when everything went to hell.
No i hate the fucking agrument of it Was for the time. Ok not say racist and so on and yes are something i feel like for the time. But i don’t this is full Excuse
As good as it was for its time, the effects really broke/disturbed the story. The lighting made everything look like plastic and the physics were not accurate. These issues made it too difficult to fully suspend one's disbelief.
Waaahhh, my state of the art for 1994 TV CGI doesn't look as good as a 21st century movie... I can't believe any of it, WAAHHHH... lol.. crybaby.. It was better than anything else on TV at the time.
I don't agree. I was totally invested in it as a story, it was absolutely compelling TV at the time. I remember once or twice wincing at the odd really bad shot, but overall the effects were stunning for TV and it's odd to think they might have detracted from the amazing story. I still remember that ZOMG feeling at the end of Season 3 cliffhanger, wondering how I was going to wait all that time until the next season. But I suppose if you weren't into it that wouldn't really matter. The one thing that did really irritate me was Delenn's hair going *under* her crest. :) Star Trek had, by realism's standard, terrible effects. But like watching a theatre production, you just zone out the unreality as a viewer.
Oh, I understand and I agree. I've been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and at times I've been in awe at the VFX they were able to pull off back then. In a time when computers were only beginning to come into their own, Star Trek already had some very interesting uses for them. Besides the many simulated computer interfaces, there's also a number of "real-world" effects and I believe the exterior shots were digitally composited. I know that CG effects were already pretty big in the broadcasting world circa '87-'88, but those effects were rarely intended to be photorealistic. So it's not that I don't understand the technology perspective, and how amazing all these sequences were at the time, but from a purely objective standpoint there's obviously no competition even with the less sophisticated renderings of today.
And again, this certainly isn't bad but even today, we still can't realistically beat physical models on TV budgets. In film, sure we can if we try hard enough, but on TV we're not quite there yet. The Enterprise-D certainly looks more convincing than the Discovery or the Orville.
Even back then compared to TNG Babylon 5 did not look right. It made it near impossible to fully suspend one's disbelief and fall into the story lines.
Only now, in the last 5 years or so, has CGI become good enough to be made to look convincing enough on a TV budget. But now that they finally have the technology, they ruin it by putting lens flares over everything.
Very, very low-res. Low enough that you could always tell the difference between the live-action shots and the CG ones. Adequate (barely) for SD-TV, useless for cinema, and certainly not acceptable for TV today.
Amiga was pioneer pretty much on eveything.
KarpowSCX Imagine if they would have continued to evolve and be in business. Back then Amiga was #1 when it came to graphics, then the somewhat distant Atari ST #2, and extremely distant PC #3. It was not competition to be honest.
Exactly, it was the best system ever. No other system had the same impact on contemporary computing.
Amiga was great. These days it seems young people have problems understanding how remarkable the machine architecture was.
even though the technology primitive it does look solid esp for it's time. They are right, CGI is good depending on the filmmaker, artist, designer behind it.
Only Amiga makes it possible :)
From what i have read from various sources,the Amiga hardware and video toaster was only involved in the pilot in 1993,seasons 1-3 were made on Pentium PC's with the lightwave software,i was under the impression until a few years ago that all the 5 seasons of B5 were made on at least a mix of Amigas and PCs,the Amiga was central to B5's beginnings but the software is what really powered the CGI rather than the actual hardware.
only amiga!!!
Amiga forever!
It’s funny to remember that Babylon 5’s CGI used to look amazing for TV. Watching old BTS videos of then state of the art CG is the best
I miss my toaster :(
I'm curious as a CGI artist. How did the Amiga store it's rendered images, then composite CG video between or into live-action shots? Hard disk space and access speeds where.. well, marginal to put it mildly. (even on the Amiga) The Amiga Toaster still used external Analogue sources as best I am aware. So are they compositing image to image, or within images?
Some of the composting was done in the 3d program, Lightwave. you could bring in an image sequence and map it onto a polygon. For output a PAR card (personal Animation Recorder) was used. It would read the image sequence from a hard drive and play it back. Keep in mind we are only talking about 720 X 486 resolution back then. Before that you had to have the computer hooked up to a Video deck that could record one frame at a time. The deck would do a 2 minutes pre-roll, record the frame, roll back two minutes, record the frame, etc etc. Between rendering and recording it could take days to get a animation recorded.
Video Toaster FTW!
Personally [and this's as a DS9'er] I think the VFX Studio for B5 did a commendable job, especially for a time when 3D Animation was only just taking off in children's programming with *Insektors*, *Reboot* & *Beast Wars* .
(some of that being years after B5 debuted)
Same studio that did B5's VFX would go on to do *Max Steel* , a rather innovative series in its own right... unlike the hideous reboot it got in recent years.
Where B5 looks less good today IMO is the sets & costuming, which sadly can't be fixed by a remastered edition. DS9 did have costuming issues to a point in S1, but overall looks a lot better in retrospect, despite having no remaster as of 2021 (and Trek post-2005 having dreadful IP owners and... well everything 😒).
both shows WARS Ended to fast
𝚿 The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father 𝚿
Good old days :'-(
Checkov!
Alfred Bester is the name you're looking for.
lol wtf
Yeah, I didn't know he was in this. He still sounds kinda Russian.
@@0x777 Get out of MY HEAD!
What were the cpu specks?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000
More likely a 68040 or even 68060 for the later parts of the series.
*****
Not only that but the CPUs of the time were based on extremely simplistic architectures.
For example a Single Core G3258 clocked @1GHz from today would outpace a 4GHz Pentium 4.
CGI isn't so much about the CPU power it's how long the system takes to render everything. What took a 2 weeks to render in the late 80's might take 30 seconds today. Barring storage constraints you could still do photo realistic rendering in that era, it'd literally just take forever.
+Louis Cyfear
Only the pilot movie and the first season used A4000 machines, mostly 68040/40. Foundation Imaging switched to Pentiums and DEC Alphas at the beginning of season 2. Later seasons also made use of SGI hardware, mainly O2 workstations. Composing/editing was, for the most part, done on Power Macs.
They seem to be using A2000 in this video.
everyone here is talking how " it aged poorly" or "it was bad even for the time"
i mean sure, the visual effects like lasers and lighting on footage was not good, that's a given.
but when comes to the full cgi shots, the real issue was not the CGI itself. if you look on youtube you gonna see renders of original CGI scenes in HD resolution
and holy shit. just check it out yourself.
most of the visual issues was when they had to mix the filmed footage and the cgi footage in a single thing that could be broadcasted. that's when everything went to hell.
No i hate the fucking agrument of it Was for the time. Ok not say racist and so on and yes are something i feel like for the time.
But i don’t this is full Excuse
@@Melvinshermen are you having a stroke?
Can everyone please tell me what is the name of this show?
Babylon5, this is the making of Babylon 5
@@amigang thanks
As good as it was for its time, the effects really broke/disturbed the story. The lighting made everything look like plastic and the physics were not accurate. These issues made it too difficult to fully suspend one's disbelief.
Waaahhh, my state of the art for 1994 TV CGI doesn't look as good as a 21st century movie... I can't believe any of it, WAAHHHH...
lol.. crybaby.. It was better than anything else on TV at the time.
I don't agree. I was totally invested in it as a story, it was absolutely compelling TV at the time. I remember once or twice wincing at the odd really bad shot, but overall the effects were stunning for TV and it's odd to think they might have detracted from the amazing story. I still remember that ZOMG feeling at the end of Season 3 cliffhanger, wondering how I was going to wait all that time until the next season. But I suppose if you weren't into it that wouldn't really matter.
The one thing that did really irritate me was Delenn's hair going *under* her crest. :)
Star Trek had, by realism's standard, terrible effects. But like watching a theatre production, you just zone out the unreality as a viewer.
It looks good for 1994...but damn, it hasn't aged well.
Oh, I understand and I agree. I've been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and at times I've been in awe at the VFX they were able to pull off back then. In a time when computers were only beginning to come into their own, Star Trek already had some very interesting uses for them. Besides the many simulated computer interfaces, there's also a number of "real-world" effects and I believe the exterior shots were digitally composited. I know that CG effects were already pretty big in the broadcasting world circa '87-'88, but those effects were rarely intended to be photorealistic.
So it's not that I don't understand the technology perspective, and how amazing all these sequences were at the time, but from a purely objective standpoint there's obviously no competition even with the less sophisticated renderings of today.
And again, this certainly isn't bad but even today, we still can't realistically beat physical models on TV budgets. In film, sure we can if we try hard enough, but on TV we're not quite there yet. The Enterprise-D certainly looks more convincing than the Discovery or the Orville.
Yeah, sure, CGI is more versatile, but if I recall correctly real models are actually cheaper than doing photorealistic CGI.
Even back then compared to TNG Babylon 5 did not look right. It made it near impossible to fully suspend one's disbelief and fall into the story lines.
Only now, in the last 5 years or so, has CGI become good enough to be made to look convincing enough on a TV budget. But now that they finally have the technology, they ruin it by putting lens flares over everything.
Very, very low-res. Low enough that you could always tell the difference between the live-action shots and the CG ones. Adequate (barely) for SD-TV, useless for cinema, and certainly not acceptable for TV today.