Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Jul 12, 2005 8:53:00 GMT -4
Thanks for the contribution, Dwight. Welcome to Apollohoax.
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Post by sts60 on Jul 12, 2005 9:31:14 GMT -4
Dwight steps up to the plate in his first appearance and goes deep! Translation for non-American/non-baseball fans: Nice first post, Dwight! Welcome.
You've addressed something which is seen a lot in hoax discussions, namely, the shoddiness and flimsiness of the claims - as if it was impossible to tilt a camera by remote control during Apollo, or to get a decent sequence with three tries. Or the attempt to leverage the most tenuous interpretation into evidence of a coverup/hoax, as if the opinion of some guy in a Police cover band was equal in value to the physical, personal, and media Apollo record. Sheesh. Now a Who cover band, maybe...
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Post by dwight on Jul 12, 2005 12:10:38 GMT -4
Thanks for the welcome! I actually read this site frequently, and stay out of engineering discussions, as I am not well versed in the physics and maths. However I take issue with people claiming knowldge of video and tv operational techniques, that don't even know how long remote control pan and tilt heads have been around. I have been doing TV work since 1984 and I defintely can say I have seen my share of folk trying to get into the industry who dont even know the difference between PAL and NTSC (and their current digital inacarnations). Reading how impossible it is to remotely contol a camera in a delay scenario while I happen doing just that (well just before my coffee break, anyway) is so absurd its funny. At maximum it took me 20 minutes to get the feel for a new remote setup last week. That's with a presenter tightly frame who insists on rocking backwards and forwards. If I knew that in 4 seconds they would move stage left, then I could adequately pan pre-emptively to keep the shot framed, without question. Oh for the joy of being able to operate a remote camera shooting a LM launch!
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Post by dwight on Jul 12, 2005 12:12:47 GMT -4
By the way,
ENG = Electronic News gathering OB = Outside Broadcast RGB = Red, Blue, Green CCU = Camera Control Unit
Sorry for the jargon.
Dwight
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Post by JayUtah on Jul 12, 2005 12:46:52 GMT -4
Excellent post, Dwight. Don't feel as if you have to stay out of the engineering discussions; clearly you have a sharp mind.
One aspect of my life that I don't frequently discuss here is that I occasionally play pipe organs in churches. Some of the larger tracker-type organs with a Ruckpositiv behind the console force you to sit facing away from the action in a sort of cockpit with no visibility. Many such arrangements provide a small television monitor with a steerable video camera placed on the key desk so that you can see what's going on and thereby know when to start and stop playing. So you quickly learn the art of panning and zooming the remote camera -- with its inherent delays -- while at the same time playing the Proulx Gloria and trying to turn the blasted page.
The LRV's camera was hobbled a bit by having fixed zoom, pan, and tilt rates. Zoomed in too far, the fixed tilt rate would not keep the ascending LM in frame. So a combination of zoom-out and tilt was required. The tilt rate was, I believe, 3 degrees per second.
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Post by ktesibios on Jul 12, 2005 16:48:35 GMT -4
Furthermore, as early as 1947, RCA had tested the colour wheel colour TV system. This is the same technology used to transmit colour TV from the surface of the moon, with the exception of the RGB integration which was handled at earth based stations via video disc frame buffering. That sequential-frame color-wheel arrangement was one of the contenders for the USA color TV standard. It was rejected because color transmissions using that standard could not be made compatible with existing black and white receivers, but it proved the concept and created a knowledge base that may have assisted the engineers developing the Apollo color camera. If you go to the link in Joe Durnavitch's post above, check out the paper called "The Color War Goes to the Moon". About the problems involved in getting the timing of the zoom and tilt commands right to capture the LM liftoff: Back in the day before digital audio workstations, "fly-ins" (transferring audio elements from a source tape to the master tape "on-the-fly", i.e., without the use of mechanical or electronic synchronization) was a common practice in the recording industry. A typical process for a music project would be: 1. Record a dozen or more (I've done as many as two dozen) tracks of background vocals onto a slave multitrack reel. The singers listen to a guide mix recorded on the slave to stay in time. 2. Mix background tracks into stereo blends; print blends to a stereo tape. 3. Play master reel, at the appropriate moments put stereo machine with BV blends in play and copy blends to two tracks of the master reel. For this to work, the stereo tape has to be parked a second or so ahead of where each segment of BVs begins, to ensure that it will be fully up to play speed by the time the vocals start. This means that the engineer has to hit the PLAY button a second or so ahead of the point where the BVs start- and do it at exactly the right time for the stereo machine to come up to speed and be playing in sync with the song on the master. This is a lot like what Ed Fendell had to do- to trigger a process before the event of interest happens so that the delayed result of the process will be in time with the event. It's a learnable skill. Any time you listen to an R&B record from the late '80s to early '90s (using samplers to do fly-ins without having to deal with park-ahead delays came in in the mid '90s and using workstations to edit it all together a bit later) you are almost certainly hearing the results of someone exercising that skill. "Flying-in" was also a very commonly used technique in assembling audio for radio and TV commercials. As a species we seem to have quite a knack for learning to adapt to and work around the weirdities and limitations of our tools.
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Jul 12, 2005 16:56:48 GMT -4
This means that the engineer has to hit the PLAY button a second or so ahead of the point where the BVs start- and do it at exactly the right time for the stereo machine to come up to speed and be playing in sync with the song on the master.
I bet there was a lot of cursing under the breath when you missed the right time and came up to speed out of sync.
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Post by turbonium on Jul 16, 2005 8:14:56 GMT -4
I guess its cos we love our children. And you guys are our children. We don't like it when we travel round the world - which we do quite a lot - and we hardly ever hear an American accent... We get to talk to every nation under the Sun - but not You... You Yanks have done some good things for this world but at the moment you are the most hated nation on earth. And I don't think that's fair - but it's true. Charlie Cripes, Charlie - I have my doubts about Apollo, but at least show these guys some respect. They've shown good faith in answering your questions, at least give them a nod for their efforts. Now I see why some people here are edgy about talking to me.....
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