Apollo 11 Original Videotape Recordings to be Auctioned

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by rockclassics, Jul 1, 2019.

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  1. rockclassics

    rockclassics Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Mainline Florida
  2. PaulKTF

    PaulKTF Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    Wouldn't NASA themselves want these for archival purposes?
     
  3. rockclassics

    rockclassics Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Mainline Florida
    You would think so but I doubt if they will pay $ 2 mil for them.
     
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  4. Nice Marmot

    Nice Marmot Nothin’ feels right but doin’ wrong anymore

    Location:
    Tryon NC
    Do they start with “Directed by Stanley Kubrick”?
     
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  5. Ghostworld

    Ghostworld Senior Member

    Location:
    US
    How much better could the original gen tapes be over what was broadcast? (Which was pretty damn spotty to begin with, understandable)
     
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  6. Right!?!
     
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  7. longdist01

    longdist01 Senior Member

    Location:
    Chicago, IL USA
    So who had possession of first-generation tapes and "not" NASA?

     
  8. rockclassics

    rockclassics Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Mainline Florida
    A former intern bought them in 1976 at a govt auction.

    Evidently the govt can't keep track of master tapes any better than the record labels.
     
  9. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    I asked an expert on Twitter, Ben Feist, who did all the audio restorations for the Apollo 11 movie. He's not the slightest bit impressed, and believe this is just another recording of the exact same thing that CBS recorded. They're 2-inch quadrature tapes, the same that CBS did, and those have been preserved in perfect condition. They're definitely not the data tapes of the slow scan video that was received at the Earth stations.
     
  10. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Ben Feist said:

    They are 2” video tape that was supposedly recorded at JSC. By the way the relays worked, JSC was just another consumer of the processed signal we already have (recorded at CBS)
     
  11. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    The original video was slow-scan, 10 frames a second at a lower resolution than standard video. Those 1 inch, 10 track data tapes been lost for years.
     
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  12. rockclassics

    rockclassics Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Mainline Florida

    Probably sold at a different govt auction. :winkgrin:
     
  13. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    Sadly, I think it was actually recorded over. They were trying to save the taxpayers money.
     
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  14. cs2003

    cs2003 Forum Resident

    These tapes are the holy grail for Apollo 11 fans. Existing off screen photos taken at the Australian tracking station show the picture quality before broadcast chain degredation.
     
  15. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    It was what they call an "optical conversion" - aiming an NTSC camera at the monitor showing the slow scan video. Back in the bad old days we used to do that to convert PAL to NTSC.
     
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  16. Dinstun

    Dinstun Forum Resident

    Location:
    Middle Tennessee
    Thanks, this is exactly what I was wondering.

    Wouldn't the 10fps video have been the data as actually received from the moon, before conversion for broadcast purposes? The fact that they could take the video and preview it is telling. If I recall, the data tapes could not have been easily converted to video.
     
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  17. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    One of the things is astounding about Apollo is how much video cameras were an afterthought. They designed the system with its limited resolution and frame-rate to fit into only 500 kilohertz of available bandwidth.

    The data logging recorders actually recorded the analog signal. It would be years before anybody could record video digitally. The monitors used long persistence phosphors to avoid flicker. (I used to have one of those for my Amiga 1000 and my TARGA board.)
     
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  18. Dinstun

    Dinstun Forum Resident

    Location:
    Middle Tennessee
    (I had an Amiga 3000 way back. Still works probably. Always wanted a Toaster, although I couldn't afford it back then and it wouldn't have fit elegantly, as it was designed for the 2000.)
     
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  19. The Ole' Rocker

    The Ole' Rocker Forum Resident

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
    You’d think they’d want to preserve mankind’s greatest achievement.
     
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  20. Jack White

    Jack White Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    That was my first thought - or the Smithsonian.
     
  21. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    It really does appear to be just another recording of exactly the same quality as they had before. Ben Feist actually called it "snake oil."
     
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  22. Jack White

    Jack White Senior Member

    Location:
    Canada
    So, you think Sotheby's is just hyping it to increase the bidding?

    "The unrestored, unenhanced and unremastered tapes are described as 'the earliest, sharpest, and most accurate surviving video images of man’s first steps on the moon,' by auction house Sotheby’s."
     
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  23. jtiner

    jtiner Forum Resident

    Location:
    Maine
    The slow scan system had its own special monitor that natively displayed the 320 line/10 frame video. That same signal was fed to analog scan converters to create the NTSC, and that NTSC video was sent through multiple microwave hops and distributed. I did read some time ago that working 1" tape machines were readily available, and if the original telemetry tapes were found, it would be relatively easy to retrieve the raw data and then perform the video conversion with modern digital signal processing, probably better than the original 320/10 video that was decoded with analog electronics at the time. There's a slight chance that the quadruplex tapes in question may be in slightly better condition than what is currently held, if the existing copies have some dropout, etc., but as Chris DeVoe says, they're essentially the same feed/quality. If you want the scoop on all things Apollo 11 video related, check out this site: Apollo 11 TV
    If you want to know what the SS video looked like compared to the scan converted video, there are samples at the above site. Here's one SS still from the monitor:
    [​IMG]
     
  24. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    I really doubt Sotheby's has a working 2 inch quad player. @Vidiot would have more idea of how many of them are out there, but I kind of doubt there's more than a dozen of them.
    If they really knew they'd have clips online.
     
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  25. marcb

    marcb Senior Member

    Location:
    DC area
    In the thread about the Universal fire, some were arguing the government should be in control of all cultural icons rather than private industry.

    This is yet an another example why this was an absurd proposition.
     
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