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

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.

2 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. the interesting link by jerome · · Score: 4, Informative

    https://www.youtube.com/user/DrydenTV/playlists

    1. Re: the interesting link by sound+vision · · 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.