NASA Uploads Hundreds of Rare Aircraft Films to YouTube (gizmodo.com)

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NASA Uploads Hundreds of Rare Aircraft Films to YouTube (gizmodo.com)

Posted by msmash on Friday July 21, 2017 @04:40AM from the good-stuff dept.

An anonymous reader shares an article: NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center is currently in the process of uploading hundreds of extremely rare films to YouTube. And I'd advise you to stop reading if you want to get any work done today. The center has uploaded roughly 300 of the planned 500 films that it will continue to put up over the coming months. And as you can see from the well-populated YouTube channel, they have everything from 1950s experimental aircraft like the X-3 Stiletto to 1960s Lunar Landing Research Vehicle tests (seen in the GIF above) to videos of the time that they intentionally crashed a Boeing 720 in 1984.

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the interesting link by jerome · 2017-07-21 04:59 · Score: 4, Informative

https://www.youtube.com/user/DrydenTV/playlists
1. Re:the interesting link by cheesybagel · 2017-07-21 08:42 · Score: 1
  
  It is nice that they took the trouble to put these up. But 480p? Plus it looks like the source is interlaced and they didn't merge the fields properly. Considering that most of these look like old film reels couldn't NASA clean them up and get us some high definition videos?
  I guess they don't pay the NASA archival guys nearly enough.
2. Re:the interesting link by Ichijo · 2017-07-21 08:56 · Score: 2
  
  Let's hope they just wanted to get something up quickly and will replace them with higher quality versions once they've had a chance to clean, rescan, and digitally restore the original films. 16mm films should give us sharp but grainy 1080p video, while 35mm is good for up to 4k.
  
  --
  Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
3. Re: the interesting link by Zero__Kelvin · 2017-07-21 08:59 · Score: 1
  
  They need to get McGee from NCIS to click the "Enhance" button. Are you even serious right now?
  
  --
  Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
4. Re:the interesting link by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 09:12 · Score: 0
  
  If they just posted them, they're probably getting processed by YouTube. It's common for the low-res versions to appear first, followed by the others hours or even days later.
5. Re: the interesting link by sound+vision · 2017-07-21 13:28 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Yes, he is serious. The film cameras these would have been shot on do not interlace. If the YouTube videos look like they have gone through a bad deinterlacing filter, that implies some things. The uploaded copies are at least two generations removed from the source material. Probably what happened is that the source material was converted to NTSC some time in the pre-digital era, which would be done for TV broadcast, or to make VHS tapes.
  
  You don't need to have a magic Enhance button, but you do need to go to the original source material (assuming it is available) to be a competent archivist.
6. Re: the interesting link by Zero__Kelvin · 2017-07-21 13:35 · Score: 0
  
  I'm willing to bet my life against a dollar that you don't know what was available as source material, and are therefore talking out your paper asshole.
  
  --
  Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
7. Re:the interesting link by k6mfw · 2017-07-21 14:27 · Score: 1
  
  I guess they don't pay the NASA archival guys nearly enough.
  Exactly. Those that are in archival/history positions are few, have tons of stuff with no time to sort through it all, and have to beg for places to put it. Then there's others with duties that have nothing to do with archiving but yet they have lots of stuff. Not proper to take it home but have to deal with limited office space so where to put it all. Perhaps in some warehouse like shown in the end of Raiders of Lost Ark movie. It will be safe but nobody will find it ever again.
  
  --
  mfwright@batnet.com
8. Re: the interesting link by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 14:36 · Score: 0
  
  Unlike yourself, who talks out of a disease infested, feces encrusted asshole.
9. Re: the interesting link by cheesybagel · 2017-07-22 02:24 · Score: 1
  
  It does not take a genius to recognize film dirt and scratches. Look at the XB-70 videos for example:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
  Vertical scratches and specs of dirt on film. If it was horizontal white noise scratches then it would have been tape. The video also seems to have heavy amounts of dithering in it possibly from the video encoding filter. Magnify the video to full screen and when there is movement you will see the horizontal line band tearing typical of interlaced video. So, like the other guy said above, this was film converted to NTSC video, encoded with VP9 in .webm (at least the version I'm looking at).
  Yes I get paid to work on video as a secondary occupation. I've shot and edited commercials. I've also converted old video on request for clients.
  Quite possibly a large part of the original image was even cut in the transfer as most film is not 4:3 like that video.
10. Re: the interesting link by Zero__Kelvin · 2017-07-22 02:29 · Score: 1
  
  You still haven't proved they had a better source with which to work.
  
  --
  Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
11. Re: the interesting link by cheesybagel · 2017-07-22 10:25 · Score: 1
  
  So you're telling me no one preserved the original film? I don't think so.
12. Re: the interesting link by Zero__Kelvin · 2017-07-22 10:47 · Score: 1
  
  Not what I said. I rightly implied the person responsible for putting up the videos likely didn't have access to them.
  
  --
  Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
13. Re: the interesting link by sound+vision · 2017-07-22 12:27 · Score: 1
  
  I don't know what they had available to them, and yet that has no bearing on anything I said. I'm sorry that you can't be educated without being butthurt.
14. Re: the interesting link by cheesybagel · 2017-07-23 05:12 · Score: 1
  
  It's still no excuse not to deinterlace the videos properly before uploading them as 480p.
15. Re: the interesting link by Zero__Kelvin · 2017-07-23 07:04 · Score: 1
  
  Of course it is .... They know only Douchebag idiots like you are going to come up with imaginary stories about what they did and didn't do, and they don't give a fuck what you say.
  
  --
  Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
16. Re: the interesting link by cheesybagel · 2017-07-25 15:16 · Score: 1
  
  Are you a retard or do you only play one in Slashdot?
It's quite telling what they left out. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 05:07 · Score: 1

In the lifting body section, they left out the crash that almost killed Col. Steve Austin - and of course right after, NASA/OSI made those films about Col. Austin's missions.
The question is, why are they trying to hide it now? I blame the Trump administration! The Russians obviously have something to with it. Austin is now working for the Russians?
1. Re:It's quite telling what they left out. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 05:50 · Score: 0
  
  They also left out the documentary about the alien invasion that occurred in Boulder, CO around the same time period. Fortunately these valuable historical archives are available on YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu.
2. Re:It's quite telling what they left out. by davester666 · 2017-07-21 06:50 · Score: 2
  
  They also made a documentary out of it.
  It's called "Independence Day".
  
  --
  Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
NASA films are so well produced, love 'em by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 05:13 · Score: 0, Flamebait

That series of movies back in the 60s called the Apollo Program or something like that -- what a breakthrough for its time. The actors in the series were spot on, though some of the props they used were fairly unsophisticated and led to some eye rolling moments for the audiences.
With all the garbage Hollywood produces nowadays, it would be nice to see NASA produce another sequel of that series.
1. Re:NASA films are so well produced, love 'em by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 05:22 · Score: 0
  
  What do you mean "another" sequel? What was the first sequel to this "Apollo Program" movie from the 1960s? And what were some of these unsophisticated props you mean?
2. Re:NASA films are so well produced, love 'em by k6mfw · 2017-07-21 14:37 · Score: 1
  
  don't know why you are downvoted, obviously having some fun... Note that at the time NASA had the ***best*** footage because it was real during a time when there were people still living when they remembered reading fresh newspaper article of the first airplane flight. And the special effects of movies were not that great (but they sure did make up with compelling story and character development). Nowadays, show someone a raw image from Cassini spacecraft and they'll say it's a photoshop of something.
  
  --
  mfwright@batnet.com
Clickbait? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 05:19 · Score: 0

>And I'd advise you to stop reading if you want to get any work done today.
I find this phenomenon of a writer dictating how their audience should react to something to be incredibly unsettling. I seem to run into this sort of writing frequently which indicates it must be an effective tool for generating revenue. Is there another way to generate income? Something feels unscrupulous and dishonest when someone is trying to exploit a psychological shortcut to coerce people into action. It's like they're saying "hey fuck you, click the link! You can spend the next four hours feeding your addiction to instant gratification! And while you're at it click some ads you mouth-breathing feces-flinging coinpurse ".
I'll concede it's unfair to go after this article because the content has actual substance but it would be nice if I could consume news without negotiating around a writer's ulterior motives.
1. Re:Clickbait? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 05:54 · Score: 0
  
  Um, the writer's ulterior motive is the exact same as the explicit motive: Hey, there's this really cool site of NASA flight films. Check it out!
2. Re:Clickbait? by bws111 · 2017-07-21 06:42 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Lighten up, Frances. This wasn't a 'news' article, it was a blg post. Apparently the writer found these videos interesting, so he decided to make a post about it. And apparently he presumed that if you are reading his blog you have similar interests, and would also find these videos interesting. And there are a lot of them, so you could spend your day looking at them.
3. Re:Clickbait? by sysrammer · 2017-07-21 07:45 · Score: 1
  
  " it must be an effective tool for generating revenue. "
  Must be. It got your clicks.
  
  --
  His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
4. Re:Clickbait? by nintendoeats · 2017-07-21 14:32 · Score: 1
  
  I agree with you entirely, but I don't think that applies in this case. The headline was fact-based and direct. You have to already have clicked through to the story in order to get what I think the author genuinely intended to be an amusing bit of character.
  You have the right target, but I think you shot wide and hit a civilian.
Why it's late by Tablizer · 2017-07-21 05:29 · Score: 1

It took them 40 years to scrub out all the grays managing the projects.

--
Table-ized A.I.
Take'em all down by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 05:44 · Score: 0

If the videos aren't all subtitled and the aircraft aren't all handicap accessible, I'm sueing.
1. Re:Take'em all down by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 08:28 · Score: 0
  
  Have they been screened for micro-aggressions yet?
2. Re:Take'em all down by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 13:18 · Score: 0
  
  Pruned for cultural expropriation?
Moonrace! by Geoffrey.landis · 2017-07-21 05:51 · Score: 4, Insightful

The series "Moonrace!" ran from 1968 to 1972-- it was a sequel to the very popular "Space Race!" series.
They did a sequel called "Skylab!" that ran for a few episodes in the 1970s, but didn't get very good ratings and got cancelled early. Then they tried one more revival, with the terrible name "Apollo-Soyuz Test Project", where they tried to get a more international audience, but that was cancelled after the pilot in 1975.
There is talk of a reboot, but the fan community is understandably skeptical.

--
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
1. Re:Moonrace! by sysrammer · 2017-07-21 07:52 · Score: 1
  
  "Then they tried one more revival, with the terrible name "Apollo-Soyuz Test Project""
  Yeah, they missed a bet when they named it that. They should have done a national survey for the name. Spacey McSpaceface would have spun off its own series, I'm sure.
  
  --
  His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
2. Re:Moonrace! by Ichijo · 2017-07-21 11:09 · Score: 2
  
  Dammit, I thought my google-fu was failing because I couldn't find any reference to those movies online anywhere, just the actual space missions.
  I am not a smart man.
  
  --
  Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
3. Re:Moonrace! by sysrammer · 2017-07-21 13:17 · Score: 1
  
  Nah, that's not it. It's Fake News(tm), where nobody's smart.
  
  --
  His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
WTF is a rare film? by Bartles · 2017-07-21 06:22 · Score: 0

By definition a "film" is a one off. And as soon as it makes it onto the internet, rare is an oxymoron.
1. Re:WTF is a rare film? by Chris+Mattern · 2017-07-21 07:11 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe they're films about rare aircraft, rather than rare films about aircraft.
2. Re:WTF is a rare film? by ls671 · 2017-07-21 07:43 · Score: 1
  
  Or copies of the films were rare before they were put into the Internet...
  Depending on the encoding used, original version copies might still be rare.
  
  --
  Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
3. Re:WTF is a rare film? by sysrammer · 2017-07-21 07:55 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  You know what they say..."It's a rare medium that's done well".
  --
  Sorry. I'll go back to work now.
  
  --
  His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
4. Re:WTF is a rare film? by UnknowingFool · 2017-07-21 08:14 · Score: 2
  
  You do know that 1) the originals were on film so technically they are films. 2) the "rare" part is that very few people had them. In this case only NASA has these films so they are "one-offs" by your own definition. In contrast, how many films existed of the Challenger explosion. A few because there were more than a few members of the public that filmed it. NASA looked all footage when trying to asses what happened.
  
  --
  Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
5. Re:WTF is a rare film? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 09:02 · Score: 0
  
  rare is an oxymoron.
  I can only wish that a moron such as yourself was rare. However morons are not rare at all.
6. Re:WTF is a rare film? by thegarbz · 2017-07-21 09:17 · Score: 1
  
  And as soon as it makes it onto the internet, rare is an oxymoron
  Not at all true. For all the bits floating around the internet having a single video posted on a single site definitely fits the definition of rare.
7. Re: WTF is a rare film? by adrianhensler · 2017-07-21 09:50 · Score: 1
  
  Genius post. This comment made my day. Thanks!
8. Re:WTF is a rare film? by sysrammer · 2017-07-21 13:20 · Score: 1
  
  Er, I'm not sure you would find that definition in a dictionary. Of course, you did do the air quotes, so "film" can pretty much mean whatever you want.
  Nevermind, carry on.
  
  --
  His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
9. Re:WTF is a rare film? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 13:23 · Score: 0
  
  But we're talking oxymorons here! This is someone with an extra oxygen molecule attached.
10. Re:WTF is a rare film? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 14:38 · Score: 0
  
  Sounds like he has an extra chromosome attached too.
Tomorrow's headline by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 06:29 · Score: 0

World in disbelief as Steve from PR dept. accidentally uploads moon landing set build to youtube
Well, there went the rest of my day by p51d007 · 2017-07-21 06:54 · Score: 1

See ya...
Its to late by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 08:56 · Score: 0

"And I'd advise you to stop reading"
Sorry, I've already read the magic words "NASA" and "YouTube", there's not a Nerd on the planet who isn't working on a server crash thats going to listen to your advice.
Are any of these videos we haven't seen before? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 09:22 · Score: 0

All of the videos listed in the summary sound like videos we've seen countless times in documentaries and on TV.
Editors these days by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 09:39 · Score: 0

"(seen in the GIF above)"
Oh my God, you left it in. You left it in!
Finally.... by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 09:52 · Score: 0

...something interesting on Slashdot.
Where's all the UFO stuff ? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 12:06 · Score: 0

I guess I'll have to watch the grainy Secureteam10 shit.
1. Re:Where's all the UFO stuff ? by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 13:27 · Score: 0
  
  If there's no wiki page for them, they don't exist.
Upload it to the Internet Archive by martiniturbide · 2017-07-21 13:38 · Score: 1

The Internet Archive is a better way to upload videos to be archived. archive.org
Film! by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-21 13:40 · Score: 0

It's interesting that these were super awesome high tech planes and the cameras at the time were super shitty.
just wait for the alien breeding videos by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-22 01:03 · Score: 0

And the B-roll material shot for the moon landing.
NASA uploads old home videos. by Anonymous Coward · 2017-07-26 03:33 · Score: 0

They have 99 crashes but Extraterrestrial UFO's ain't one of them.