A wrong selection of source material for seasons 2 and 3 is causing the SciFi channel to now air cropped-from-4:3 versions of the episodes. JMS let us know the following (on November 19th 2000):
| Just to let folks know...Doug and I have gotten into the situation, and have been working with both WB and SFC to straighten the situation out. WB has finally backtracked the problem, and will be taking steps shortly, as in the coming week or two, to fix it and begin the process of providing new (and proper) widescreen copies. |
| There will be some delay on the physical delivery of the tapes, because the original prints are all in cold storage, and you literally have to allow them time to defrost before you can run them through, and then there's the duplication time involved...and we haven't yet determined if new copies will be provided from S2 ep 1 and on in that order, or if they'll try to nail the next ones up in the airing schedule to get the corrected versions on the air sooner...but either way, we have been given assurances that the problem is now being dealt with. |
| SFC has been very helpful and patient in this situation, and it looks as if there was an error at the duplicating lab contracted by WB, literally a case of loading the wrong prints into the system, because the S5 eps are in proper widescreen, so we're looking at errors in S2-4 only. |
| Today I went to a meeting at Warner Bros. technical support, where we went over the problems detected in the SFC widescreen airings. I now have some answers and some information on this. I have to say up front that the WB folks have been nothing but helpful and determined to fix the problems. |
| In "Midnight on the Firing Line," wherein a teapot is shown instead of a starship when the audio indicates the latter...the editor explained that it resulted from a pause/freeze frame during assembly, and when he restarted the equipment, it jumped shots. This will be fixed. |
| In "Covictions," wherein a comp shot of several monitors doesn't show the surveilance footage, but rather shows just the original babcom logo...they had missed this on their list of comp shots, and will go back and insert the proper footage now that they know the problem is there. (They QC everything, but often with the audio down, so they had no way of knowing that they were talking about camera footage, and figured that it was okay since there was something -- the babcom logo -- in the monitors rather than totally blank screens.) |
| In "Inquisitor," wherein the west end/east end audio correction wasn't made...they were going off the original PAL audio transfers, which in this case didn't work because we made that audio correction *after* broadcast and replaced the audio for that shot afterward. They're going to go back to the revised 24 track audio and insert the proper audio. |
| Here's what's going to happen beyond this. |
| 1) WB is going to go back to using *only* the original 24 track audio stems for the dubs. |
| 2) Seasons 4 and 5 as it turns out are already in proper wide versions, as is season 1, so the only ones that need to be addressed are seasons 2 and 3. |
| 3) WB is going to run cassettes of the whole series in the new version and I'm going to personally go over every damn episode personally looking for any potential problem areas (such as comps that may not have been recognized as such by the WB editors). It's possible that I may miss something here and there, because 110 hours is a LOT of TV to watch...but it'll certainly help. |
| They were *extremely* helpful and apologetic at WB, and are determined to do everything they can to fix the situation as fast as possible. |
| As for the audio...the audio transfers are being done directly off the original clones (either the original PAL, digibeta or 24 track stems), and QC'd. So what they suspect *may* be the problem is if the SFC is running the digital tracks through a dolby decoder. If you try to decode Dolby that isn't there, on a digital track (which doesn't need Dolby because it's digital) it can make the audio crunchy or lead to drop-outs, pops and other problems. I've sent word to SFC to have them check that at their end of things. |
| So the situation is well in hand. |