Babylon 5 - lost tales

[Piru]

CGSociety featured article: Babylon 5 - lost tales

Oh, not only being extremely exciting stuff to begin with, page 2 of the article brifly mentions amiga.

[derringer3]

"We were working on Amigas, Video Toasters, which were massively primitive."

Uhh, where is my shotgun :madashell:

[Piru]

Uhm, that is the truth if you remember the context: By today's standards they were massively primitive.

[motorollin]

But he said "*were* massively primitive", not "*are* massively primitive, which means he thought they were primitive at the time they were using them.

--
moto

[kidkoala]

@all

He meant WHERE primitive, when using Amigas you got great results from a small budget back then, whereas using really expensive equipment would produces better results, but for a much higher price. Babylon 5's budget for FX was RELATIVELY small, compared to movies made for theater etc.

[Piru]

@motorollin

Not being a native english speaker I sometimes have trouble with tenses, but IMO you can't draw such conclusions from that sentence.

[cecilia]

Every so often, in the middle of a render, a rabbit would chew through a wire. They would call me to tell me they had a rabbit crash.

:roflmao:

come on, guys, don't get your panties all in a snit!

Of course the Amiga rendering farms were "primative".

anytime you are a pioneer things are going to be rough. just understand that Amiga was the foundation of what we see today as computer special effects. There's a great deal to be proud of right there.

after all, those cave people who first used fire to warm themselves and make tools were not dressed in suits and fancy dresses. But without them we would not be here, calling on cell phones, using the internet to communicate, living in warm homes with indoor plumbing.

the beginning is Always "primative".

[cecilia]

kidkoala wrote:
@all

He meant WHERE primitive, when using Amigas you got great results from a small budget back then, whereas using really expensive equipment would produces better results, but for a much higher price. Babylon 5's budget for FX was RELATIVELY small, compared to movies made for theater etc.

well, that's not quite correct.

the REASON people used Amigas was because that was the only way to have complete control over the effects - you did it all yourself. If a Studio did it, not only would it be Expensive it wouldn't be Yours.

The Amiga made the Revolution possible. people like me and my friends could get our own computers and software and using nothing more than our brains, time, effort and sweat could do what the "Big Boys" in the studio were doing.

It's more than just money. It's people power.

[kidkoala]

If the Babylon 5 people had more money, they would've used a studio. I also remember having read that somewhere in an article about the low budget and using Amigas. After the first season they migrated over to a bigger studio using PC's, among other things because they got a bigger budget for the following seasons. If using Amigas gave you better results why didn't all the big producers and moviemakers use the same Amigastudio as Babylon 5 did? (remember they didn't do it themselves, they used a small Amiga fx-studio). Basically what i'm saying is using the incredibly cheap, but smart and powerful solutions of the Amiga gave them the power they needed at first, when the success of the series showed they dropped the small amiga-firm for something else that presumably also cost more.

[jkirk]

motorollin wrote:
But he said "*were* massively primitive", not "*are* massively primitive, which means he thought they were primitive at the time they were using them.

--
moto

if he thought badly of them he would have never brought it up in the interview. and definitely would not have told of the "rabbit crash".lol

[Argo]

Yeah, remember the person in the article is talking about an Amiga render farm in someone's apartment with cables running all over, even through his pet rabbits cages! Where render failures were when one of the rabbits would bit through one of the cables.
Not if the Amiga render farm was setup in a professional looking studio or studio room, it might not have looked so "primitive". I think the statement has as much to do with the setting the render farm was in as the technology that ran it. Not to mention the guy probably worked really cheap.

[weirdami]

He meant WHERE primitive

Wow, that makes it much clearer. :-?

[Tigger]

kidkoala wrote:
If the Babylon 5 people had more money, they would've used a studio. I also remember having read that somewhere in an article about the low budget and using Amigas. After the first season they migrated over to a bigger studio using PC's, among other things because they got a bigger budget for the following seasons.  Basically what i'm saying is using the incredibly cheap, but smart and powerful solutions of the Amiga gave them the power they needed at first, when the success of the series showed they dropped the small amiga-firm for something else that presumably also cost more.

Actually there is several untruths in your comments.   First of all the turnover from Amigas to PCs was because the PCs were faster, just for a reference.  When I got my first PC for the house, it was a 100Mhz Pentium, it rendered 10X faster then my 25Mhz 68040 4000 on identical scenes.  When the PC and Alpha versions of lightwave came out, it was faster, they moved to the faster systems.   Basically the same people Foundation Imaging(led by Ron Thornton) did the pilot and the first 3 seasons of Babylon 5, then some of them stayed on for the last 2 season and Crusade, when Babylons fearless leader took the special effects in house by starting his own company for the effects, Netter Digital Imaging, they also used Lightwave.  The Amigas used for the pilot (and for Seaquest) were as fast as they could make them but even with the couple of Screamers they had helping out, the move to faster machines had to happen especially with Commodore going under.
    -Tig
   

[kidkoala]

@weirdami

hehe, thanks for noticing me, though you could've done it in a more friendly manner??

@tigger

I don't know details like you do, so it's great that people with knowledge puts out some info., but I think we kinda agree here. They moved to pc because they were faster you say, I say they moved to pc's because they were better, so that's about the same reason. And how could they have made the move over to faster equipment if they didn't get a bigger budget from the producers (changing all your equipment etc. is not a cheap migration)? The new studio (as I call it when you get new equipment, probably new housing, probably a few new employers and a new name for the company) must've cost more than a few amigas with lightwave..
I agree that the transition also probably was made due to the Commodore bankruptcy.

[AmigaMance]

 Does anyone know which version of LightWave did they use back then and with what plug-ins?