What with Paramount complaining that they lost a ton of Money doing the TNG Blus, no way in hell will Warners pony up for this to be upgraded
I and others have suggested a Kickstarter to convince Paramount to re-master DS9 the way they did TNG. Some people who know that end of the industry calculated the man-hours from what they knew of the TNG remaster, plus manufacture and packaging and such. The final estimate was all over the place, but, well-advertised, it'd probably have made the outlay Paramount/CBS would have been looking at within a month.
B5 has a smaller fanbase than Trek, but at least as dedicated. I have a feeling if JMS started a KS for this sort of thing, it'd be funded in a similar timeframe.
I had thought that the film elements of the composite shots were simply gone, and that all we had left were the composite shots which can't really be fixed.
To the extent that the film portion of the composite shots still exist, it's theoretically possible to redo the digital effects anew, and remix the film components in. The problem with that, though, is that you lose a lot of the "film history" aspects of CGI in the early to late 90s on TV.
Thing is, over the years, the people I've been hearing say the film stock is lost has been WB, primarily. I don't know the details of the agreement between them and JMS, but when he's been asked directly about that, his answers feel more like... he's saying something he was told to say. If that makes sense.
As for the film history aspect, see below...
At this point, I think the wiser course is to just, you know, be happy with what we have, accept its flaws, and realize that what you're really watching for isn't the F/X but the story.
I honestly don't care. I have the whole series on DVD and I don't need any more. I don't care if it holds up to today's standards, it isn't a modern show. I can sit down and watch the Sherlock Holmes movies from the 1940s and not feel like they need to be remade. They are a product of their time like everything is. Anyone who can't deal with that has problems.
I'm all for keeping what is. But what is is not what is on DVD. That is the top-and-bottom-cropped version aired on TNT. If we're going to argue keeping the original, then what I want is the unaltered 4:3 versions of seasons 1-4, and then the 16:9 season 5 and movies and follow-on series. I want the entire existing picture. Even if we can't get the original 16:9 live-action elements of the first four seasons, I at least want people's heads not cropped off or "subliminal" messages rendered unreadable.
Where I get talking re-master is if --
if -- the original live-action negatives can be found and new CG elements added to make the whole 16:9. But if not, I'd be happy with what we have if we could undo that damage.
