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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.
...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
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
"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?
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).
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
"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.
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.
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.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
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.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
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.
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.