Spawn, bad news about the NASA Apollo 11 tapes.
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The tapes being unveiled at the Newseium today are probably just improved broadcast recordings from networks that recorded the original live broadcast. TV engineers have been discussing this over the past week, and I happen to have access to one of these - very verbose - engineers. Here's what he said:
- Two video recordings were made.
- The first was reduced at transmission from the moon to 320x240 (or thereabouts) and 10 or 12 fps (standard TV broadcast is 29.97 fps). This was to reduce the data rate and make space for telemetry data.
- To convert this to a live broadcast, they did a live video transfer. Essentially, they pointed a camera to a monitor, et voila!
- There was a higher definition recording (not HD, just higher definition, probably SD NTSC) made, but it was in a newfangled technology that couldn't be converted on the fly.
- These recordings, they wanted to convert electronically (not just pointing a camera at the source), but the technology did not yet exist.
- The tapes were ultimately shipped from Australia to Houston and then lost (National Archives? Erased?) These are the tapes we all hoped would be discovered. No such luck.
Mop
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