NASA Uploads Hundreds of Rare Aircraft Films to YouTube

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.

the interesting link

[jerome]

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

Re:

[cheesybagel]

It is nice that they took the trouble to put these up. But 480p? Plus it looks like the source is interlaced and they didn't merge the fields properly. Considering that most of these look like old film reels couldn't NASA clean them up and get us some high definition videos?

I guess they don't pay the NASA archival guys nearly enough.

Re:

[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

[Zero__Kelvin]

They need to get McGee from NCIS to click the "Enhance" button. Are you even serious right now?

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.

Re:

[Zero__Kelvin]

I'm willing to bet my life against a dollar that you don't know what was available as source material, and are therefore talking out your paper asshole.

Re:

[cheesybagel]

It does not take a genius to recognize film dirt and scratches. Look at the XB-70 videos for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Vertical scratches and specs of dirt on film. If it was horizontal white noise scratches then it would have been tape. The video also seems to have heavy amounts of dithering in it possibly from the video encoding filter. Magnify the video to full screen and when there is movement you will see the horizontal line band tearing typical of interlaced video. So, like the other gu

Re:

[Zero__Kelvin]

You still haven't proved they had a better source with which to work.

Re:

[cheesybagel]

So you're telling me no one preserved the original film? I don't think so.

Re:

[Zero__Kelvin]

Not what I said. I rightly implied the person responsible for putting up the videos likely didn't have access to them.

Re:

[cheesybagel]

It's still no excuse not to deinterlace the videos properly before uploading them as 480p.

Re:

[Zero__Kelvin]

Of course it is .... They know only Douchebag idiots like you are going to come up with imaginary stories about what they did and didn't do, and they don't give a fuck what you say.

Re:

[cheesybagel]

Are you a retard or do you only play one in Slashdot?

Re:

[sound+vision]

I don't know what they had available to them, and yet that has no bearing on anything I said. I'm sorry that you can't be educated without being butthurt.

Re:

[k6mfw]

I guess they don't pay the NASA archival guys nearly enough.

Exactly. Those that are in archival/history positions are few, have tons of stuff with no time to sort through it all, and have to beg for places to put it. Then there's others with duties that have nothing to do with archiving but yet they have lots of stuff. Not proper to take it home but have to deal with limited office space so where to put it all. Perhaps in some warehouse like shown in the end of Raiders of Lost Ark movie. It will be safe but nobody will find it ever again.

It's quite telling what they left out.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the lifting body section, they left out the crash that almost killed Col. Steve Austin - and of course right after, NASA/OSI made those films about Col. Austin's missions.

The question is, why are they trying to hide it now? I blame the Trump administration! The Russians obviously have something to with it. Austin is now working for the Russians?

Re:

[davester666]

They also made a documentary out of it.

It's called "Independence Day".

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:

[sysrammer]

"Then they tried one more revival, with the terrible name "Apollo-Soyuz Test Project""

Yeah, they missed a bet when they named it that. They should have done a national survey for the name. Spacey McSpaceface would have spun off its own series, I'm sure.

Re:

[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:

[sysrammer]

Nah, that's not it. It's Fake News(tm), where nobody's smart.

Re:

[k6mfw]

don't know why you are downvoted, obviously having some fun... Note that at the time NASA had the ***best*** footage because it was real during a time when there were people still living when they remembered reading fresh newspaper article of the first airplane flight. And the special effects of movies were not that great (but they sure did make up with compelling story and character development). Nowadays, show someone a raw image from Cassini spacecraft and they'll say it's a photoshop of something.

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:

[sysrammer]

" it must be an effective tool for generating revenue. "

Must be. It got your clicks.

Re:

[nintendoeats]

I agree with you entirely, but I don't think that applies in this case. The headline was fact-based and direct. You have to already have clicked through to the story in order to get what I think the author genuinely intended to be an amusing bit of character.

You have the right target, but I think you shot wide and hit a civilian.

Why it's late

[Tablizer]

It took them 40 years to scrub out all the grays managing the projects.

WTF is a rare film?

[Bartles]

By definition a "film" is a one off. And as soon as it makes it onto the internet, rare is an oxymoron.

Re:

[Chris Mattern]

Maybe they're films about rare aircraft, rather than rare films about aircraft.

Re:

[ls671]

Or copies of the films were rare before they were put into the Internet...

Depending on the encoding used, original version copies might still be rare.

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?

[adrianhensler]

Genius post. This comment made my day. Thanks!

Re:

[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.

Re:

[thegarbz]

And as soon as it makes it onto the internet, rare is an oxymoron

Not at all true. For all the bits floating around the internet having a single video posted on a single site definitely fits the definition of rare.

Re:

[sysrammer]

Er, I'm not sure you would find that definition in a dictionary. Of course, you did do the air quotes, so "film" can pretty much mean whatever you want.

Nevermind, carry on.

Well, there went the rest of my day

[p51d007]

See ya...

Upload it to the Internet Archive

[martiniturbide]

The Internet Archive is a better way to upload videos to be archived. archive.org