SpaceCraft Fillms and the "Unedited" claim

[TimberWolfAu]

Hey all,

Quick query; where did the idea come from that the SpaceCraft films series for Apollo are unedited? I have Apollo 11 and 15, and the audio is definitely edited. There are instances where the communications are cut early, as halfway through words, but you can clearly hear the complete audio from other sources (such as Mr.Gorsky on YouTube or the flight and surface journals).

Specifically, it got me wondering since there is a claim in American Moon about "missing" audio delays, and they use examples from Apollo 15 that they said are from SpaceCraft films, so I thought I'd check for my self (shock horror, I know) and at the point they refer to, my version cuts off the comment from Houston before he finishes speaking, while the example in American Moon has the full line.

Given the audio and visuals were recorded at different locations, and then had to be combined later to create the DVD's, why would people think it's unedited? The boxes/DVD cases don't make this claim either, well, mine don't. I mean, just the simple fact that the run time of the DVD's is far shorter than the missions, even if we only take the audio portions of the missions, AND includes footage and interviews beyond the actual missions themselves.

Is this one of those throw away comments that has ballooned into a "fact" and now is "evidence" for a hoax because the audio in SpaceCraft films is edited?

*Edit* Forgot to mention, my next step is to grab some of the original transcripts, since they have timing noted in them too. These are amusing too, though. I don't recall which specific mission, but one of the transcripts has the crew travelling 20 seconds back in time. One person on FB was convinced they were hiding details because the Lunar Surface Journal had been edited to correct this, yet you can see they originally had just copied the timings from the original written transcripts from the missions.

[onebigmonkey]

They have decided that Spacecraft films are immutable truth because a) It suits them to do so and b) They are burned onto DVDs, so not even evil NASA can come round and alter them. As they are convinced that NASA is constantly montoring their ability to come up with whistleblower clues and smoking guns and then post facto editing them out of the record, it's vital that they use only pristine DVDs.

They'll ignore hour upon hour of recorded footage and photos in order to dance with glee over anything they think confirms some sort of chicanery, when it never is that.

As for original NASA documentation, I've lost count of the mislabelled and mis-identified things in documents like photo indices because someone who has no idea what they're looking at has done the labelling, or has obviously misheard something recorded in the transcripts. There are many cases where photos are reversed becauee the person in charge of publishing it is so unfamilar with what the Earth looks like from space they haven't realised.

If they're presented with half a dozen sources that are correct, and one that has been altered for aesthetic or editorial other reasons, guess which one they'll piuck.

[TippedIceberg]

It seems to be based on dubious research. To quote American Moon:

If there is one thing everybody agrees on, it's that the DVDs by Spacecraft Films are the only originals that can be used as reference for any kind of research.

They attempt to back up that claim by firstly showing a couple of debunker Paolo Attivissimo speeches. But in the clips, Paolo seems to be specifically talking about the reliability of Apollo video footage. And then this Clavius page is shown, which only states "film and video, unedited" - audio is not mentioned. 

Running with that, American Moon seems to hint the correctly-timed ALSJ audio was therefore edited to artificially insert delays. It can't possibly be the DVD audio that is cut down

In reality, Spacecraft Films likely removed the silences for runtime. There is no active TV transmission in the "delay too short" clips American Moon uses as examples.

Any documentary serious about researching Apollo audio would rely on original audio tape dumps. File 572-AAA contains the lines in question (at around 1h in), of course the delays are correct and match the transcript scans.

[JayUtah]

And then this Clavius page is shown, which only states "film and video, unedited" - audio is not mentioned.

I haven't paid attention to Spacecraft Films in years, nor talked to Mark Gray in that long. While their DVDs contain some unedited film and video, they also contain edited video. If I recall correctly, there are sections of the EVAs in which periods where nothing happened has been edited out. The hours-long video is still there if you want to see it.

The statement at Clavius is not meant to elevate Spacecraft Films to the status of a primary source.

Any documentary serious about researching Apollo audio would rely on original audio tape dumps. File 572-AAA contains the lines in question (at around 1h in), of course the delays are correct and match the transcript scans.

Correct. Any commercial source of Apollo pictures and sound (aside from the designated contractors to NASA) is a secondary source.

[TimberWolfAu]

Thanks all, pretty much covered my thoughts here.

Incidentally, I went and found the same coms section in the Apollo 15 transcripts (APOLLO 15 VOICE TRANSCRIPT PERTAINING TO THE GEOLOGY OF THE LANDING SITE), and how strange, the timing in the transcript lines up with the timing that NASA, apparently, altered to increase the delay, rather than lining up with the SpaceCraft Films DVD. Who would have thunk it!?

Of course, since these are PDF's, the only possible explanation is that NASA also changed all the timings in the transcripts to keep the hoax going