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> Especially the simulation footage where the lack of brightness made it hard to see the vehicle - they might as well have used KSP for it

Livestream simulated footage continues to be a joke with all space agencies, private and government alike. They really should be using KSP for it - it's not hard to wire up with external telemetry, and with couple graphics mods, it looks way better than whatever expensive commercial professional grade simulator rendering they're using (which I suspect is part of a package that may be really, really great at simulations - and is intentionally not great at visuals of this kind, as it doesn't show anything that isn't directly representing some measurement).

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I suspect this is a frequency thing. Early SpaceX broadcasts were pretty rough. NASA just doesn't do launch coverage with the same sort of cadence.

Honestly, they should consider outsourcing that bit.

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I think this is a “you have one job” kind of thing for shooting liftoff (no matter what quality of equipment is on hand): rocket goes up, tilt camera up.

Bonus: Try to match the speed of the tilt with the speed of the rocket in the frame.

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They did that with the Apollo 17 LEM lift-off

https://www.redsharknews.com/technology-computing/item/2742-...

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If I saw that in any other context I would have assumed it was a low budget special effect--mostly due the spray of rainbow sparkles when the module separates from the base.
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It's a sequential colour camera, each field is red, green or blue filtered (using a spinning colour wheel), and they're processed back on earth to recombine them into a colour TV picture. Doesn't work that well with fast motion, as there's too much movement between the red, green, and blue images, hence the rainbowing. They were of course bandwidth limited so conventional NTSC might be an issue. Also a normal colour TV camera at the time used three (or four) image tubes, rather than the one in the Apollo cameras, which would have added size and weight (this is before things like CCDs were practical).
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We can send a man to the moon, but we can’t have HD footage of the man going to the moon.

/s but not really

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We are a pretty quirky species when you think about it. This comment right here is kinda why I love humans so much.
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SpaceX had a lot of rough footage before they figured it out and they have many more tries to correct it
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Okay but the live stream for YouTube used a dslr live feed which I guess they didn't tell the camera operator for lift off because they started to snap still shots and the video feed had a visible shutter and then still frame for 1 second in the video feed. So to reiterate the official nasa YouTube stream ruined the lift off video stream.
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Was going to say, I think everyone forgot about early SpaceX product quality.

And NASA probably does have great video of it available, it’s just the live broadcast that missed it.

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> I think everyone forgot about early SpaceX product quality.

This was 8 years ago and is one of the greatest stuff I've seen in space launches. The footage is so epic that it even got replicated in SciFi series! ... https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=1313

This was 9 years ago, first droneship landing - https://youtu.be/7pUAydjne5M?t=1642

And this is 18 years ago, their first Falcon1 launch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bET0mRnqxQM

More live video from the ascent than we got on Artemis2 for sure...

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> evoke a feeling of substance over form...

The feeling it evoked in me was that a multi billion dollar PR program could surely afford to spend a little bit of money on reliable camera tracking, telemetry overlays, visualisations that run at more than 0.1 FPS, etc.

Absolutely bizarre.

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Indeed. This has been my gripe since first SpaceX booster landing attempts - I understand that "livestream from an IMAX camera" may be very low at the list of priorities for space missions, but... it shouldn't. Even if recovered after the fact, having a solid, high-quality footage from flight and orbit would make a huge impact on the publicity goals they're all explicitly trying to achieve. There's a shortage of good footage from space; at this point, a 4k/60FPS recording released in public domain would easily redefine how space scenes look in movies, TV and video games in the next decade[0].

I'm not saying it's an easy engineering problem, but at least for LEO, the recording side is a solved problems (we all carry more than good enough hardware in our pockets), and the major challenge would be about keeping the lense/viewport clear throughout the ascent, and dealing with vibrations.

--

[0] - It already happened many times. The step shift of how black holes are portrayed after Interstellar folks did the math is the most obvious one to notice; more subtly recent productions seem to also take into account the asymmetry of the brightness, after the telescope photo of a black hole reached public awareness. But even earlier, there's e.g. been a change of how planets are shown - you see much less of the geographical atlas spheres with clear continent lines, and much more of low-angle, close-up shots that look suspiciously similar to the footage from the International Space Station.

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> at this point, a 4k/60FPS recording released in public domain would easily redefine how space scenes look in movies, TV and video games in the next decade[0].

no? why you think it would ? We know how it looks like already

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Knowing is one thing, seeing is another. Art - and general population - is more receptive to the latter.
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> NASA launches do evoke a feeling of substance over form

For real?

I was rolling my eyes hard at:

    GC systems go?

    GC systems go for all for humanity!
And then the VERY scripted pre-launch speeches. It’s like everyone there had been taking notes from inspirational hero movies.

It’s cool. But let’s not act like going around the moon is the most historic thing ever… since we’ve already done it plenty, right?

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They literally played clips from actors in recent moon movies so yes, they definitely were taking notes from movies.
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The entire prelaunch is scripted. Safety is the point of prelaunch checklists and polls. Why would you get bent out of shape over each of them being able to give their own response to the final call before launch?
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I didn’t realize an eye roll and considering that they’re LARPing themselves for theatrical effect… was “getting bent out of shape”.

Perhaps I enjoy competence over narrative nonsense? Maybe pessimism has been highly undersold this generation and too many people are willing to buy into any basic narrative of emotion nudging they’re shown?

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I mean are they really larping? They are mission control for NASA seems like if anyone is going to giving dramatic pre-launch sentiments they would be the ones
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They had one part - literally one line - of a scripted and serious safety checklist where they could express themselves. Some chose to be kinda muted, some chose to be kinda over the top. Maybe get over yourself?
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What NASA does goes in the history books.

What SpaceX does goes in quarterly reports.

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Even SpaceX is only okay with their broadcasts. They normalized showing very little data and spending the whole time with talking heads that don't say anything.

Go look what the livestream was like for the Mars Curiosity rover, it was fantastic, and that was on a mission taking place 8 minutes away. Their simulation was mostly Demo data for some parts of the mission, but included such things as what part of the control program it was in! It was even a good rendering. I screenshotted it for a desktop background.

But the camera quality is so low and I don't get it.

It seems like the entire industry has just ignored the lessons of old: "Get someone who does this for a living". They should have connections and partnerships with movie companies who actually know how to run cameras. That shouldn't be expensive nowadays, as that knowledge seems to be cheap enough for Youtube creators.

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