There is another elephant in the room that has not been addressed. The official storage medium of TV footage at NARA until the mid 1970's was 16mm kinescope. These are 24 frames per second. This means the original TV feed has had what is commonly referred to as inverse pulldown, to make the 29.97fps compatiple with 24fps for film.
Secondly as opposed to the color TV signal, the Apollo 7,8,9 and 11 black and white TV signal was shot at 10 fps. In order to convert this to 30fps, a different type of conversion was utilized than for the color-matrixing for the later missions. This is how the slow scan conversion was handled:
A scan converter built by RCA was the unit chosen to convert the slow scan TV signal from Apollo 7, Apollo 8, Apollo 9 and the Apollo 11 moonwalk. Their unit very similar to that devised by Westinghouse, used a stock standard video camera which had seen use in film-to-video telecine, and in the days prior to videotape was also used to record video onto film (a process
known as kinescope). It was a black-and white Vidicon tube camera pointed at a 10” high resolution cathode ray monitor.
The monitor had a persistent phosphor which caused the image to remain on the screen for longer than normal. The TK-22 was gated to record 1 frame as it was written onto the high resolution screen. The output from the camera was a standard interlaced NTSC video signal. 1 full frame of video information was composed from two fields of 262.5 lines which the camera could not properly record from the 10 frame-per-second rate. The first field was recorded correctly, but the second field would be recording off the monitor when the next frame of video information was already being written, resulting in a messy signal which generated a lot of problems in the conversion process. This snag was overcome by recording
the first field onto a video disc recorder which would then repeat the redundant field with a delay built into every second field to allow it to mimic the missing field that the camera was unable to capture.
Essentially, the TK-22 recorded the first field, with the disc recorder repeating the fields while adjusting them so that they correctly formed a full NTSC image. This process was repeated to form the “missing” 3 frames of NTSC video and the resulting output was a fully compatible NTSC video signal. There was one major drawback, which unfortunately the technology of the time could not solve. The picture was unavoidably degraded as it was optically converted and this on top of the already reduced resolution of the incoming slow scan TV signal.
Similar to the color TV archived material, the Apollo 11 TV footage was also converted to kinescope. This was updated in 2009 when the Telemetry Tape Search Group (in which I was involved) obtained the videotapes held by CBS. The first step from Honeysuckle was obtained from a privately held copy. Although this material is also held as a kinescope in Australia.
