Space History Footage In HD

The Discovery Channel has done a deal with NASA to enhance old film footage from the space program up to the standards of HD. Discovery will air, in HD, a 6-part special called "When We Left Earth," beginning June 8. Judging by the trailer it should be pretty spectacular, a good introduction to the wonders of space exploration for a new generation. After the show airs, NASA gets the improved footage for their archives.

Comments

Space may be the final frontier

[BattleCat]

but it's made in the Hollywood basement (c) RHCP

So....

[TheCrip]

in HD, will we finally be able to see the wires helping Armstrong look like he is on the moon? :P

Re:So....

[martin-boundary]

I'm hoping to see 30% more explosions, and some laser fights :)

Re:So....

[Midnight Thunder]

in HD, will we finally be able to see the wires helping Armstrong look like he is on the moon? :P


Possibly, but I am just convinced the special effects will be better. After that I am just just waiting for a George Lucas style Director's cut ;)

Re:So....

[tristian_was_here]

Do you think they will change all laser weapons to walkie-talkies?

Re:So....

[Anonymous Coward]

Will he cast a certain VP as Jabba the Hut?

Re:So....

[hondo77]

After that I am just just waiting for a George Lucas style Director's cut

You don't want to see that:

Neil Armstrong: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

Jar Jar Aldrin: Meesa gonna go next! Woopsie...

Jar Jar tumbles down the ladder, landing on Armstrong.

Armstrong: Jar Jaaaarr!

Commercial venture for the greater good

[BearRanger]

It's so rare to see a public-private venture in media/entertainment that ultimately benefits everyone. I doubt if most of us would have a chance to peruse the NASA archives otherwise. And the US taxpayer gets historically significant data upgraded to a modern, longer lasting medium for free. A win-win all around.

Re:Commercial venture for the greater good

[nigelo]

And the audio is in HD?

I think not. Can anyone explain why we saw colour pictures in some fidelity, yet the sound was worse than CB quality? And still is, even from the latest projects?

Re:Commercial venture for the greater good

[0123456]

"Can anyone explain why we saw colour pictures in some fidelity, yet the sound was worse than CB quality?"

Because the pictures were mostly shot on 16mm film or better, while the sound was typically recorded on analogue tape after transmission over a low-bandwidth radio link from space to ground?

Re:Commercial venture for the greater good

[NeverVotedBush]

Along a different line, the DVD series "Trinity and Beyond - The Atomic Bomb Movie" is a similar endeavor. Lots of old and degraded footage cleaned up and brought back to life for transfer to digital.

Not so much of the "benefits everyone" aspect, but still very cool to see the old films cleaned up and preserved.

Re:Commercial venture for the greater good

[Anonymous Coward]

I think not. Can anyone explain why we saw colour pictures in some fidelity, yet the sound was worse than CB quality? And still is, even from the latest projects?

I'm truly saddened to see that someone with such a low UID isn't able to figure this out for himself. Seriously.

Re:Commercial venture for the greater good

[grumling]

Because the radios they were using were single sideband.

Re:Commercial venture for the greater good

[nigelo]

Wait - we were watching pictures sent and broadcast live - and we still do, on the NASA channel - and so 16mm film really has nothing to do with it.

So, no, that's not an explanation, is it?

Re:Commercial venture for the greater good

[nigelo]

Thanks for the detailed explanation ;-)

Clearly, I'm a novice in this area, otherwise it would be obvious to me, too.
I checked out this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-sideband_modulation but I can't say I'm much the wiser on the reason, or where to go next. Got any useful references that might help?

It would seem to me that if the picture is of pretty good quality, then the sound should be too. Is my expectation of 'pretty good' set too high for the audio, then? Audio quality degrades much faster than video quality when compressed/sent from space?

When I shoot video on my camera, the sound is relatively crystal-clear, and is a small portion of the total size of the resulting video file. So, how come the audio from the space station/space shuttle sounds so lo-fi, yet the pictures are quite noiseless, full-colour?

Re:Commercial venture for the greater good

[Viadd]

If you remember, back in 1969, watching glorious full-color live images of the Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon, then either your memory is wrong, or you were using chemical enhancement to get the color. (Not unusual during the '60's).

The original camera on Apollo 11 was black and white and had 212 x 218 resolution at 10 frames per second. (It could also do 4x the resolution in each dimension at 1.4 frames per second, but that wasn't used for the news broadcasts.)

See this description for more details, or rent The Dish.

Re:Commercial venture for the greater good

[nigelo]

Rose-coloured, or rose-water filtered?

I still think the audio from the space-station sounds crappy :P

Re:Commercial venture for the greater good

[Anonymous Coward]

And If you'll recall, those pictures were taken on a crappy black and white television camera. And I mean CRAPPY... an old 60's tube camera. The footage we're talking about here, and in fact all of the COLOR imagery you have EVER seen from the moon, was shot on film, and scans of that film are possible at higher resolution now than when there were first scanned.

Re:Commercial venture for the greater good

[Anonymous Coward]

The Unified S-Band (USB) comms for Apollo were designed to provide audio quality comparable to what was/is typical for air/ground aircraft comms. That is, 3kHz or so bandwidth. The goal wasn't to provide an "entertainment experience", but rather, to provide essential mission comms with limited resources.

Re:Commercial venture for the greater good

[MrResistor]

First, there's about 40 years worth of Moore's Law separating the the audio system in your camera and the audio system used while recording this source material. On top of that, they weren't recording it on a sound stage or in a studio, so there's a lot of noise (background noise, wind, interference, etc) and it's actually pretty hard to clean up audio noise without losing some of the signal you want.

That said, the main reason it sounds like they're talking over CB is because that's more or less exactly what they were doing.

"enhance?"

[adam]

...enhance old film footage from the spacee program up to the standards of HD...

I just want to take a brief issue with the wording here. There is likely little "enhancement" done for this film to reach "HD standards." Of course it depends on the film format, and how it has been stored, but assuming it has been taken care of properly, and is 16mm or larger, there would be no enhancing required.

(A few lightly technical ramblings) Film is better than today's HD video, in virtually every regard, except cost (assuming we are talking about 35mm, not super8 ;) ...35mm stocks from the 1960s were quite good even by today's standards. The major breakthroughs in film have been more along the lines of packing more light sensitivity into finer grained films. Which is to say today's ASA500 looks as good as 1975's ASA100. Which means that ASA100 film from 1975 doesn't need any "enhancing" to look good in HD (most HD tv shows that air nowadays are shot ASA500 and scanned directly to HD). I saw a scan of The Sound of Music negative a year or two ago, and it looked GLORIOUS (it was shot 70mm). Anyway, some brief searching on NASA's site does seem to show that they may have used 9.5mm single perf film at times (I found a transcript that has a statement referencing 9mm footage), but I am having difficulty confirming this anywhere else. Long story short, the trailer looked nice, this footage is a great treasure to all mankind, and one should probably not downplay the quality of film used then. It seems to me their archiving-for-all-posterity budget has experienced a shrink commensurate to the other budgetary aspects, because I can tell you firsthand some of the equipment they are flying (or considering flying) now I wouldn't use for videos of my dogs playing in the yard!

Re:"enhance?"

[0123456]

"There is likely little "enhancement" done for this film to reach "HD standards.""

As another poster mentioned below, there's probably been a substantial amount of grading and cleanup done to footage that was shot in far from ideal conditions and probably hasn't been stored terribly well.

Re:"enhance?"

[dotancohen]

...enhance old film footage from the spacee program up to the standards of HD... I just want to take a brief issue with the wording here. There is likely little "enhancement" done for this film to reach "HD standards." And the word "spacee" didn't set off any red lights?

Re:"enhance?"

[Anonymous Coward]

"enhace" may refer to them removing scratches and other blemishes, and probably adjusting the color balance. The latter is quite likely to have suffered quite badly even under very good storage conditions.

Re:"enhance?"

[instarx]

IN the 70's I went to a presentation by an astronaut at my university and he projected some film shot out the window during some docking maneuvers. It was projected large, it had to be a copy not the original, and it was incredibly sharp. So sharp it was obvious how much air degrades acuity even over short distances. There was no way it was 9mm. So they may have used 9mm but not all the time.

Looks like they did a great job on the footage...

[KH2002]

Judging from the trailer, it's not just a matter of doing an HD video transfer; in fact, that may well be the least of it. What it looks like is that the footage has been seriously color-corrected & restored.

After you get used to seeing those clips from old, battered & faded prints, it's remarkable to see them cleaned up, corrected and smoothed out. Like getting used to seeing old faded color prints in an album, and then suddenly they look like recent shots. Almost like a time machine.

I'm really looking forward to this.

Trailer

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is the trailer in postage stamp size if it's promoting an HD film?

Re:Trailer

[NeverVotedBush]

Uh, network bandwidth?

Re:Trailer

[Rebelgecko]

I think that's what the full screen button in the bottom-right corner of the video is for (the trailer still isn't very good quality though)

Re:Trailer

[WuphonsReach]

Uh, network bandwidth?

Meh, that's no longer a good excuse. The modern codecs are efficient enough that you can easily show 640x360 sized clips without busting the bandwidth.

What Does That Mean?

[LuYu]

NASA gets the improved footage for their archives.

What does this mean? Is it not NASA's footage to begin with? Are you telling me that the Discovery Channel's people went back in time and refilmed the Apollo missions and created some sort of copyrighted work?

On top of this, the statement seems to imply that the Discovery Channel is being gracious by returning the footage to NASA. This is as if you borrow my shirt and imply that because you washed it, it is now yours and that you are doing me a favour by returning it to me.

It is nice to know the Discovery Channel is so gracious. :-/

Re:What Does That Mean?

[0123456]

"What does this mean? Is it not NASA's footage to begin with? Are you telling me that the Discovery Channel's people went back in time and refilmed the Apollo missions and created some sort of copyrighted work?"

Technically, yes. As I understand it, NASA footage is generally in the public domain, but if you pay to telecine that footage from film to tape and then clean it up, you have copyright over that specific copy of the footage; there's no legal responsibility to give NASA a copy.

It may sound silly, but that's copyright law for you.

Re:What Does That Mean?

[NeverVotedBush]

Maybe I don't understand what you are asking, because this all seems pretty clear to me.

Basically Discovery Channel, in return for access to all of the materials, will give NASA one or more copies of the final work.

NASA could do all of the restoration themselves but it would be very costly and I doubt, in this time of BushCo budget cuts, that NASA has the spare change to pay for the restoration.

This agreement allows both parties to benefit - a nice result.

Obviously nobody went back in time. DC used their extensive A/V resources to restore the NASA footage.

Re:What Does That Mean?

[Vectronic]

No, what it means is, NASA gives The Discovery Channel permission to wander through their current archives, enhance what they need/want to to make their documentary video, and NASA gets an improved version of some of their (already archived) footage, at no, or little expense to NASA... this saves NASA having to do it themselves.

Much like BearRanger said (up there ^) It's a win-win all around...

Re:What Does That Mean?

[LuYu]

So, derivatives of copyrighted works remain copyrighted, but derivatives of Public Domain works do not remain in the Public Domain.

I think the Public is getting ripped off.

Re:What Does That Mean?

[Anonymous Freak]

You are correct. That's why the GPL is specifically written to be "viral", to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

"Public Domain" means that the original work is 100% free from any claim of copyright, for any use whatsoever. NOBODY "owns" it.

However, in order to qualify for copyright, there has to be "substantially different" from another work. Merely "cleaning up" would likely not qualify. (That's why if you were to publish a photograph of a public domain painting, for example, if your photograph is EXACTLY of the painting, with no extra artistic work added, then your photograph is not copyrightable. But if you take it from an angle, then you can claim that your angle is an artistic addition, therefore placing your photograph under copyright.)

So the raw act of cleaning the footage probably didn't add copyright, but all of the other stuff did. (Performing color balancing and other tasks other than pure physical 'cleaning' of the film stock.)

Re:What Does That Mean?

[RDW]

'So the raw act of cleaning the footage probably didn't add copyright, but all of the other stuff did. (Performing color balancing and other tasks other than pure physical 'cleaning' of the film stock.)'

I've been wondering how this sort of thing affects audio recordings. Here in the UK, we're in the interesting position of having a 50 year limit on recording copyright, and there are several companies that do a very good job of restoring and re-releasing out of copyright material (often better than the major labels that continue to sell overpriced and poorly transferred CDs of 'their' artists). Some of this material is still very marketable (e.g. classical and jazz from the 50s), and will soon include major artists/cash cows from the 60s (early Beatles records in 2013). Reputable companies that lack access to the masters will usually try to get hold of the best preserved publicly released vinyl or shellac discs they can find and restore from them. Less reputable companies casually 'pirate' the CDs released by the restorers, avoiding the substantial amount of work that goes into a typical restoration. The legality of the latter seems to be something of a grey area, at least in the UK:

http://www.copyright.mediarights.co.uk/

'It is debatable as to whether merely removing "clicks and crackle" from an old record would [establish a new copyright claim]...It is possible, however, that the creative use of equalisation or special effects...or even the making of an analogue to digital transfer, might well be sufficient...Currently there is evidence that some commercial re-issues of restored public domain sound recordings are being openly pirated, perhaps on the assumption that no copyright can exist in these copies...[this] has yet to be tested in the courts.'

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out in a few years time, when people start openly posting mp3s of Beatles albums on UK sites, selling cheap compilations in Asda, and distributing lovingly restored audiophile transfers from the original vinyl (as already happens illegally). Will there be legal moves to block international distribution (e.g. to the US, where the recordings will still be in copyright)? Will (as I assume) the current CD transfers from the 80s still be judged to be in copyright? Is the recent (and yet to be released) remastering (/remixing?) project from the original masters basically a ploy to extend copyright on the 'definitive' versions by another 50 years?

Re:What Does That Mean?

[icegreentea]

No, I think that that makes perfect sense. If I make a derivative work based on some 19th century novel, then my work shouldn't be in the public domain.

Re:What Does That Mean?

[Richard_at_work]

How is the public getting ripped off? Someone is spending time, money and effort to take the same source anyone else can and enhance it - why should that added time, money and effort then be freely available to anyone else? Everyone has access to the same original version, so get your own copy and do the enhancement yourself, there is absolutely nothing stopping you making that investment and even releasing if you wish.

Re:What Does That Mean?

[LuYu]

The question is whether enhancing a work without adding any creative information makes it a new work. Obviously, in the case under discussion, the film footage was all taken by NASA. All the Discovery Channel is doing is running it through a few computers. Can this be considered art? If I write a computer program that makes random art, can I claim copyright on the art that the computer creates? Certainly, the computer has no rights, but is a creator of a program entitled to copyright the program's output?

My program automagically turns Public Domain books into a collection of HTML documents. Am I entitled to copyright Public Domain works after they have been run through my program? I expended time and effort writing the program.

Re:What Does That Mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone has access to the same original version, so get your own copy and do the enhancement yourself, there is absolutely nothing stopping you making that investment and even releasing if you wish.

What you are suggesting is called duplicated effort, and is one of the few things in the engineering universe that is universally considered "a bad thing".

The wasted effort even has a phrase that is oft parroted by clueless execs and managers looking to shortcut design and implementation efforts where previous related work has been done, "We don't want to reinvent the wheel."

Minor correction....

[HomerNet]

You misspelled a word:

"Spacy," not "spacee" .>

+1 ironic

[adam]

historically significant data upgraded to a modern, longer lasting medium for free. I agree with most of your comment. And I promise I am not trying to be pedantic-- but digital archiving is definitely NOT a longer lasting medium. (I work in digital cinema, so this is an issue I deal with almost daily) Digital cinema is still in its infancy, and everyone is trying to standardize their own workflows now, the end link in this chain being long term archive. The nice thing about film is that it has changed relatively little as a format over the last 50-100 years, and that even if you can't deal with the format (say something with very weird perforations, or the perforations have deformed in a way that a normal scanner can't advance the film properly anymore), it is completely optical and still can be easily read with a bit of engineering. Digital archiving is prettymuch all being done to tape now, either to some proprietary format (Sony's HDCAMSR, for instance), which I don't support... or to an open format, such as LTO (which is my preference). Even with proper archive conditions (temp, humidity, etc), tape doesn't have quite the same longevity of film (although it is close in ideal conditions), and you must "format float" every five to ten years, or risk your archived material being unreadable.

So, in summary, the irony here is that for archiving purposes, the safest and cheapest way to store this material is probably on film. If this were my project, I would make redundant LTO-3/4 masters of all of the material, as well as print the digital scans to black and white film separations for each color channel. Of course, that assumption is based on this having received a proper scan (4k, pin registered) and not a cheap HDtelecine. Given the importance of the footage, I'd hope it would have.. but given my experience with the type of people who set budgets for these sort of projects (and their propensity to say things like "no one can tell the difference anyway, so we're using the cheaper option,"), my offhand guess would be this was telecined directly to compressed HD tape (ughhhhhh).

Re:+1 ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave digital archiving to the bittorrent community. Why do the content creators think that they have to do something?

Re:+1 ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

You're talking about how Discovery and NASA store it. We refer to it as preserved, simply by virtue of the fact that we'll all have this recorded and distributed world-wide in a very short timespan... effectively guaranteeing that it's never lost. And so long as someone always has a digital copy, the quality will never degrade as it does on film in a vault.

The downside is, we'll probably only have the cut and aired version, not the original remastered material. We need NASA to offer up everything they have for download. We paid for it, didn't we?

Re:+1 ironic

[Kjella]

If this were my project, I would make redundant LTO-3/4 masters of all of the material, as well as print the digital scans to black and white film separations for each color channel. I don't really care if you have to print the digital content back down on film, but I think digital still beats analog. Yes, you got multiple copies that'll get worse if you need to make more copies, they can degrade and you don't have a definitive master. What do you do to recover a new master? Averaging? Best pick? What if they're all degraded by time? With digital you have it exact. You can make sure that the film is exactly the same, bit for bit as it was when you first put it in storage. Digital storing does not mean that it positively has to be stored on magnetic media, but it does mean that you interpret it as bits with checksums and error correction and whatnot and not trying to read a dumb analog value. You can chisel digital information into a stone tablet if that's really what you want.

As for formats, I really think that is mostly a childhood problem. I have codecs installed on my machine now to read old, old copies from the 1990s in the most obscure formats possible. I don't think you'll have any problem in 2100 to find decoders for MPEG2/MPEG4/VC-1. Yes you might have to format float it to new media every 5-10 years (Is this really all more complex than installing a new tape robot next to the old one, the let the old one read and the new one write until you're done? Usually to much fewer new media too) but digital doesn't take damage from reading. Every time you read analog media, you have the chance to destroy it. Every time you read digital media, you have a chance to fix it. Between myself and my parents' machine I got redundant, bit-exact offsite backup. Every time I run a PAR check I verify the integrity, correct any bit errors and check if it's still good. Disk crashes don't touch me unless I lose the last good version (as verified by checksums). The only real danger to digital media is neglect, but I'd say it's far easier to maltreat negatives and other analog devices than digital media. Maybe the cost/benefit ratio swings as you get into really large volumes of film, but I'd never consider archiving my pictures as anything as digital and I think with the constant evolution in storage space even film will fall.

Sorry...

[jd]

They blew the special effects budget on the new Doctor Who story, "The Doctor's Daughter".

Re:Sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that the one where she calls him 'Daddy'?

Re:Sorry...

[X3J11]

They blew the special effects budget on the new Doctor Who story, "The Doctor's Daughter".

Thanks for reminding me it's time to check for the new episode. Time waits for no man, and this man waits not for the new season of Doctor Who to come to Canada, buddy.

Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

What idiotic editor put up the sub-youtube quality trailer up? It looks like they videotaped a movie screen from space. Not exactly what I had in mind with "HD Space Footage".

misleading wording.

[adam]

Almost everytime I post a comment, there are a few replies that strike me as "off base," but I generally refrain from commenting because they are almost never modded up, and thus I imagine that most people (or at least mods) realize they are off base. I'm replying to you, though, as you seem to have been modded up pretty quickly, and I want to clarify some issues for anyone NOT in cinema who is reading this thread

there's probably been a substantial amount of grading and cleanup done to footage Yes, absolutely, any film shot 30+ years ago is quite possibly going to require cleanup for any sort of professional presentation. This could normally include dust busting (removing scratches, dust specs, etc on the negative. Everytime the negative passes through a scanner, projector, etc, it gets more of these). It could also include color correction (to fix color substrate fading issues, as the color bias will generally shift during aging) as well as color grading to correct for mold/haze or any other nastyness.

My issue is that *NONE OF THAT STUFF* counts as "enhancing for HD standards." If this film was going to be shown in theatres (which would mean it would be mostly seen projected on film prints), all of that stuff would still take place. The "HD standards" statement implies that HD has "so much resolution" the film must be "up rezzed" or similar, and that was the implication I took issue with. They should have just said, "NASA has scanned and restored the original film negatives to be shown in breathtaking HD quality on the Discovery Channel" or something similar-- more technically correct than the original statement, and it still sells the whole "OMG HIGH DEF!!!" aspect.

Knowing the importance of this film, I should hope it was stored well.. but I recall vaguely that some of the original moon landing stuff is potentially lost forever so perhaps you are right and it hasn't been stored terribly well.

Re:misleading wording.

[0123456]

"They should have just said, "NASA has scanned and restored the original film negatives to be shown in breathtaking HD quality on the Discovery Channel" or something similar"

Except, uh, NASA has done nothing of the kind; they let the Discovery Channel telecine the footage and restore it, just as they have with other organisations in the past.

I'd agree that 'restoring' is more accurate than 'enhancing', but arguing over that distinction is bordering on pedantry.

"Knowing the importance of this film, I should hope it was stored well"

I wouldn't bet on that; a significant amount of it, for example, was engineering camera footage that wasn't even developed unless there was a need to do so (e.g. if something failed during the launch). Much more was engineering footage that was of use during the development, but not much use since.

Certainly I've seen much of the footage in the trailer before, and it looks better now than it did then.

Woah. this is strange...

[The Friendly Strange]

According to some older news, the original footage of the Apollo 11 mission had disappeared. IIRC it was the BBC who lost it, or was the Australia original telemetry. Anyone can confirm?

Major Tom...

[WoollyMittens]

Vintage space-age footage makes it painfully obvious that there has been no significant progress since the 70's. Nobody has been to the moon in 30+ years.

Re:Major Tom...

[CSMatt]

Well, it is just a big dull rock.

Re:Major Tom...

[WindBourne]

Yeah, but loaded with he3 as well as many other minerals including uranium. The uranium will allow us have nuclear power in space without launching from earth. If we build a small breeder up there, we can have loads of power for generations to come as well as use it to send to other places.

Sountrack

[Stellian]

What's that song at the last part of the trailer?

Re:Sountrack

[TheConstrukt]

I'm a young'un, so forgive me everyone for only knowing this from eharmonix' Rock Band.

Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones.

Re:Sountrack

[Anonymous Coward]

Gimmie Shelter by the stones. You should study your classical music, kid

Re:Sountrack

[605dave]

Another question is why that song? Although I love the song, what an anti-war song has to do with NASA is eluding me. It strikes me as a very odd choice for a soundtrack.

Re:Sountrack

[Free the Cowards]

Can you seriously not see the connection between a classic piece of popular music from the year of NASA's greatest triumph and a documentary about NASA? Or are you deliberately ignoring it to make some kind of incomprehensible point?

Re:Sountrack

[rts008]

The Rolling Stones:"Gimme Shelter" from their 'Let it Bleed' album (1969? been a long time!)

And Fox TV are also showing

[Skiron]

...their new TV programme, "The day we didn't leave Earth" at the same time.

Obligatory

[camperdave]

I'm hoping to see 30% more explosions, and some laser fights :)

Armstrong shot first!

Improved footage public domain?

[CSMatt]

The way I understand it, the majority of NASA's work is placed in the public domain. If the Discovery Channel is giving NASA a copy of their restored HD footage for their archives, will this copy be public domain as well, or will it remain under the copyright of the Discovery Channel?

Re:Improved footage public domain?

[instarx]

The way I understand it, the majority of NASA's work is placed in the public domain. If the Discovery Channel is giving NASA a copy of their restored HD footage for their archives, will this copy be public domain as well, or will it remain under the copyright of the Discovery Channel? If you use public domain photos to make a coffe-table book you own the copyright to the book. You do not own the copyright to the indvidual pictures even if you sharpen them up in Photoshop first. Anyone can photocopy one of those pictures and sell it, but they can't copy the entire book (or even large parts of it) and sell that.

Discovery Channel will not own the copyright to the NASA images, restored or not, but they will own the copyright to the "When We Left Earth" work and the creative arrangements of those images.

Unfortunate line wrapping

[Trogre]

At 86, he's trim and erect, and jokes about his age. But he's dead

What? But I thought you'd just said... So he's supposed to be some kind of zombie?

serious about the contrast...

Oh, never mind.

Re:eat my shorts slashdot !!

[hvm2hvm]

I don't understand what's up with this comments. Is it the same guy or is there some kind of troll squad? Why do(es) they(he) even do it?

NASA Budget

[Anonymous Coward]

> The agency doesn't get enough money, he [Glenn] fumed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NASA_budget_linegraph_BH.PNG

NASA's average budget since 1990 is higher, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the average NASA budget during the Apollo program (1961-1979). It peaked at about 40% higher than recent average but that was only for 5 years.

During the Apollo program they had to jumpstart entire industries to make stuff that is available today off-the-shelf. NASA should be able to do even more with that budget today.

Nice errors in the Wired blog.

[antdude]

In that Wired blog, Loretta has typos/grammar errors like "I highly recommend watching it (I think its the soundtrack that does it) and can't wait to see it larger then a tiny window in my web browser." It should be "it's" (not its) and "than" (not then).

Doesn't Wired have copy editors to check these typos/grammar errors? :)

What about

[CrackedButter]

the Discovery Channel asking NASA to commit to another series about landing on Mars or back on the Moon again? I hate watching these old re-runs again but just in hi-def!

"enhanced" audio?

[grumling]

I want to know if the audio going to be historically accurate, or will they "jazz" up the sounds to make the Saturn V sound like a Die Hard movie? I have an old laserdisk of an IMAX shuttle movie, and was just blown away by the sound of the engines at launch. Nothing produced by Hollywood comes close.

And will they change the M16s to walkie talkies?

Re:"enhanced" audio?

[WuphonsReach]

I want to know if the audio going to be historically accurate, or will they "jazz" up the sounds to make the Saturn V sound like a Die Hard movie? I have an old laserdisk of an IMAX shuttle movie, and was just blown away by the sound of the engines at launch. Nothing produced by Hollywood comes close.

*sighs* I was just watching something or another on (I think) NatGeo's HD channel last week. It was footage of the Challenger disaster and they had ADDED a white flash (i.e. the area where the explosion started was now a circular flash of white). The way it was done made it obvious that it wasn't part of the original footage, but some fool of a producer probably thought it needed spicing up.

No clue what program it was. But I was extremely disappointed in NatGeo.

Re:"enhanced" audio?

[Anonymous Coward]

A tangent on that thought - there's plenty of videos on youtube of shuttle launches. You can hear the dropout, crackling etc as the microphones on consumer camcorders saturate and clip the sound, followed, as the distance increases and noise abates, by scores of car alarms going off, miles away from the launch pad.

People who have witnessed it in person say you can feel it in your chest. I've heard tank cannons firing from a few hundred yards away. You feel that, but it comes and goes in an instant. The solid rocket boosters on the shuttle make that noise for 2-1/2 minutes.

Oh man...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got to be honest, I cried just with the trailer.

Correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. Submitter implied it's being up-rezzed which is false. Film > HDTV.

restoration or enhancement

[Iamthecheese]

Imagine if the archaeologists of the 18th century didn't just keep pottery, but "enhanced it" by making it closer to what they imagined it would have looked like originally. Well some of them did. And destroyed information in the process.
 
It is impossible to restore lost information. Color can be corrected to what is probably was, lines can be completed, etc, but thats entirely new, best guess, information, and covers up the real information that was there before it. They should store the originals for longer term storage with the highest possible digital resolution, just as they are. If they want to enhanse things for a more attractive picture, fine, but don't store it for posterity. Posterity will be very angry.

Like you've never seen it before...

[jpellino]

... especially that part in the trailer where a Saturn V launch is being addressed as "Gemini 6..", morphs into a Titan II for a shot then goes back to being a Saturn V.

No, can't say as I ever saw it like that before.

30% less more like it!

[chazzzzy]

It's actually going to probably be 30% less! In order to go wide screen, the footage will probably be letterboxed, as the footage was probably shot in 4:3.. so they will have to cut out to top and bottom parts to give us the widescreen format!

Right?

How About FREE?

[Doc Ruby]

Americans paid $billions over decades to produce all that NASA film. How about Discovery releases it all free for download, after they've gotten all the advertising revenue from the premiere (and then the reruns after the downloads are released)?

And how about NASA releases for download all their HD video they've shot? Let's see any American (or foreigner benefiting from our generosity) take a crack at editing these movies that we all paid to produce. I've seen a few HD NASA movies floating around the Net, specifically a recent Shuttle launch, and a montage of its full mission. I thought the US government doesn't actually have the power to retain copyrights (which aren't necessary "to promote progress in science and the useful arts" by the government directed by policy, not profit). Where is the whole archive, for public consumption?

The more the world sees what America does with its best spent non-social budgets, the better we will start to look again.

Re:How About FREE?

[0123456]

If you contact NASA, you probably can get copies of most of their HD footage; you'll probably have to pay for the cost of tapes and copying, though.

NASA are actually very good at giving stuff away to the public; look at the vast gigabytes of technical reports on ntrs.nasa.gov, for example. But they probably can't justify the cost of having a server with petabytes of HD footage and the huge pipes required to let people download it.

Re:How About FREE?

[Doc Ruby]

Copying and mailing tapes is a helluva lot more expensive than running an Internet server. The bandwidth and administration costs would be well worth the hugely powerful publicity for the US government and the American people, to say nothing of the educational and economic benefit of circulating the content among the public that paid to create it.

Re:How About FREE?

[0123456]

"Copying and mailing tapes is a helluva lot more expensive than running an Internet server."

NASA would have to pay for the server. You have to pay for copying tapes. See the difference?

Re:How About FREE?

[Doc Ruby]

NASA would have to pay for copying the tapes, though I would reimburse it (which transaction would add to the cost).

A NASA server would be paid by me and every taxpayer. And be much lower cost than the tape transfer process. And, with much wider distribution of that top-notch pro-American propaganda, be well worth every penny. I would hope it to scale up to become a significant cost, considering the return on that investment would be so high.

Where is the trailer in HD?

[btempleton]

That sentinal site just has a very tiny flash window. Is there a source of the trailer at HD resolution?

Re:eat my shorts slashdot !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me that (s)he wants you(slashdot) to eat his(her) shorts. (I am a vegan so must pass.)

and the answer to the ultimate question

[thermian]

Who shot first, Neil or Buzz.

Long term storage

[TheLoneGundam]

At one time there was an extremely long term storage solution called (I think) HD-ROM, which was discs of nickel etched by an ion beam. An implementation seems to be at this link http://ww.norsam.com/hdrosetta.htm/

Trailer in HD

[AeroIllini]

Does anyone have a link to this awesome new trailer for an HD special that's in... well... HD?

Watching a tiny little YouTube quality video on the OrlandoSentinel website sure is mighty impressive.

Re: Wow! Great Footage!

[dsmall]

      It's worth a couple minutes looking over the trailer for this. All the hair on my arms is standing up, and I forgot to breathe there for awhile. WOW!!!

  -- Dave Small