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.

Comments

the interesting link

[jerome]

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

Re:the interesting link

[Ichijo]

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.

Re: the interesting link

[sound vision]

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.

Moonrace!

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

Re:Moonrace!

[Ichijo]

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.

Re:Clickbait?

[bws111]

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.

Re:It's quite telling what they left out.

[davester666]

They also made a documentary out of it.

It's called "Independence Day".

Re:WTF is a rare film?

[sysrammer]

You know what they say..."It's a rare medium that's done well".
--
Sorry. I'll go back to work now.

Re:WTF is a rare film?

[UnknowingFool]

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.