Not being familiar with the technicalities of video, I couldn't follow everything Collins said, so typed out the first six minutes of his commentary and thought others here might find it useful. With thanks to Noldi400 for defining two of the terms I didn't know.
0:00:08 Hi, this is Collins. A while ago I made a little movie called Moon Hoax Not, in which I contended that at the time of the Apollo missions, we did not yet have the slow motion video technology to fake the lunar surface telecasts.
0:00:23 Jarrah White disagrees with me about that, and he made a 25-minute film to dispute what I'm saying. From the note of contempt in his voice, it does sound like Jarrah's mad at me about something.
0:00:36 White: 0:00:54 Yeah, try and wrap your head around that logic.
0:00:38 But if you look beyond that, I think he's essentially doing a good thing. Instead of waving a magic wand over the technology question, the way some people do, he's trying to come to grips with the technology, and whether you think he's wrong or right, I think we have to applaud that.
0:00:55 Now, if Jarrah is right, then that's good news for me because that means this whole awful episode of my life can be over. I can just retract what I said and move on.
0:01:06 Meanwhile, my own work experience has been misinterpreted in different ways by people of different persuasions.
0:01:12 White: 0:01:12 Collins claims to have been involved in the film business for three decades.
0:01:17 [Sigh] Well, that's dressing it up a little. What Collins really said was, "I've been shooting in the studio for about 30 years now. I know what to look for." Lighting-wise, that is.
0:01:26 That doesn't mean anybody in Hollywood has my phone number, and it doesn't make me special. There are thousands of DPs [Directors of Photography] and gaffers [Chief Lighting Technicians] out there who can take a look at a scene and give you a good guess as to how it was lit.
0:01:38 When I was younger I used to go out as a DP, and even now I have strong opinions about lighting technique which sometimes gets me in trouble with the DPs I hire in. Today I write and direct little marketing films, commercials, a few music videos, and many documentaries. My career is unremarkable. But it happened.
0:01:59 White: 0:01:22 So you've been in the film business since 1982. Hmm. That's a good ten years after the Apollo program ended.
0:02:08 You are correct, sir. I was not yet working in film and video when I was twelve. That was about the age when I first picked up an 8mm camera. But to your point, yes, my awareness of film and video technology from before I started working is necessarily incomplete. And that's why Googling stuff wouldn't be enough for me, I actually had to talk to broadcast engineers who *were* working in the 1960s.
0:02:32 The point of contention here is that if you show people moving in slow motion, they will appear to be in low gravity. Not everyone agrees with that, as you know. But we're taking that as the starting conceit and trying to see how a long, continuous telecast could have been pre-recorded in slow motion on video, not film.
0:02:53 I was curious how much overcranking we'd really need *if* slow motion *does* simulate low gravity. I read somewhere that the record speed should be 2.46 of the playback speed because that's the square root of the ratio of the gravitational accelerations of the earth and the moon, but, as you know, I'm not real good with math.
0:03:13 White: 0:11:27 Seriously?
0:03:14 So I did a little science experiment here in my apartment, which, for the record, *is* on earth. I downloaded this NTSC clip from a Nasa archive page, which estimates that David Scott dropped his hammer from a height of 160 centimetres. I made a reference point that same height and dropped my own hammer.
0:03:35 I was a little dubious about that height estimate though, because it made David seem like a giant. So I also dropped my hammer from my own shoulder height, which is about 140 centimetres.
0:03:48 Next, I scaled the clips to match in height, and time-stretched my own clip to match the duration of the astronaut's hammer-drop, 35 frames. For a drop of 160 centimetres the stretch was 220%. For 140 centimetres it was 221%. Not much difference at all.
0:04:10 This says nothing about whether the Nasa clip was real or fake, it just tells us how slow we need to go in order to replicate what they did. For a 30 fps playback, our video record speed should be about 66 fps, to match these with the Apollo 15 video.
0:04:29 For Apollo 11 it's easier, because the playback speed is lower than NTSC, so you don't really need high-speed video per se.
0:04:36 Jarrah's suggestion is that we record the whole event on quad, then transfer it in 30-second buckets to an Ampex HS-100 disk recorder, which you *can* play back in slo-mo. Edit each segment back on to a quad edit master, and...
0:04:53 White: 0:08:10 Eventually you'll have the entire EVA converted into slow motion and stored onto video tape.
0:04:58 That's a good theory. Umm, whether you can do it depends on whether you can make like 95 frame-accurate edits between the quad machine and the disk recorder in the days before time-code editing. What they did have was a system of cue-tones and multiple heads, which I'm told, *would* enable frame-accurate edits between those machines. So theoretically, what you're suggesting could be done.
0:05:23 Therefore, if slow motion does give the appearance of low gravity, and if you can perform frame-accurate edits between a disk recorder and a quad machine, then I think we have to promote faking Apollo 11 from "impossible", to "not bloody likely". That's progress, right?
0:05:40 There *is* a little confusion about the production version of the Ampex disk recorder.
0:05:46 White: 0:08:17 Upon further reading, I learned that the HS-200 lets you handle material of any length, from short commercials to complete programs. Very interesting! Well, if it can hold material of any length, that one HS-200 could eaily store the entire lunar EVA.
0:06:03 Very interesting indeed. Now forget what the copywriter told you and turn to the back page of the same brochure. The spec sheet tells you that the storage capacity for the HS-200 was the same as the HS-100.
0:06:16 But, if you ever do find a disk that can record material of any length, please let me know, cos I want one! 0:06:23
