HOME CINEMA CHOICE SEPTEMBER 2019
IT MAY HAVE happened over 50 years ago, but
I remember the moon landing as if it happened mere
weeks ago – thanks primarily to the recent blanket
coverage given to celebrate the 50th anniversary
of the Apollo 11 mission.
Roughly 600 million people watched the moon
landing live in 1969, one in six people on the planet.
The images from the surface, and their lamentable
lack of clarity, have become iconic. So why does
the most momentous event in human
history look like pirated VHS footage?
At the time, it was seen partly in black-and-white,
partly in colour. American network coverage was in
colour, TV pictures were relayed from the command
module in colour, but all the video footage from the
surface was originated in black-and-white.
In the UK, only BBC 2 was broadcasting in colour
at the time, but the moon landing was covered by
BBC 1, which had an interesting schedule. Before
the epochal event, you would have had to sit through
The Black & White Minstrel Show, before a 55-minute
preamble entitled Man on the Moon, introduced by
James Burke with Patrick Moore, from the BBC’s
Apollo studio. This was followed by an Omnibus
special featuring a live jam by Pink Floyd. The BBC
returned to Apollo coverage at 11.30pm, staying on
air overnight. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto
the surface, it was almost four o'clock in the morning.
Exactly how James Burke and the team padded
out that long night is now largely lost. The BBC wiped
its invaluable video recordings, presumably to record
more episodes of those black and white minstrels...
Even NASA seems to have lost the recordings that
it made from signals sent from the moon. What we
see now are the telemetry tape recordings made as
a backup, and archived by the National Archives and
Records Administration (NARA).
The video footage is the result of real-time
conversions of the Slow Scan video received from
the Lunar Module. To communicate with Mission
Control, it employed a unifi ed S-band transmission
system that bundled voice, telemetry, biomedical
and television communications together. Only 500
kilohertz of this was assigned to video, a fi fth of the
bandwidth of the NTSC television signal. To make
this frugality work, a crude 320-line, 10-frames-a-
second format was used. Those Slow Scan images
were then converted to NTSC, basically by pointing
a video camera at a 10in monitor. The BBC then
made a PAL version of that for EBU (European
Broadcasting Union) members. This hideous cocktail
of low-resolution and scan-converter smear resulted
in the hazy images we’re now so familiar with.
The Apollo 11 black-and-white surface camera
system, which utilised a special low-light image
intensifi er designed by Westinghouse, is still on
the lunar surface. It's probably a bit dusty now.
What the world didn’t see then was high-quality
16mm colour fi lm, shot both in mission control and
out of the window of the lunar module. And the very
best images from the surface of the moon were
actually taken by a Hasselblad camera on 70mm
medium format fi lm. These have now been scanned
into 16-bit image fi les, off ering stunning 4K resolution.
Even more extraordinary was the recent discovery
in the NARA vaults of unseen footage shot in and
around Mission Control during the Apollo program
on 70mm format using the Todd-AO process. It was
this treasure trove, duly scanned in 8K and 16K
resolutions, which allowed Todd Douglas Miller
to make his extraordinary documentary Apollo 11.
Pity there's no 4K BD release planned... QThere’s a good reason why that famous footage of man’s fi rst moon landing is so poor, explains
Steve May. Hopefully next time they'll take an 8K camera
Did you watch the moon landing live in 1969?
Let us know: email [email protected]Steve May
wonders why we
could put a man
on the moon 50
years ago but can't
make HDMI CEC
a foolproof user
experience in 2019114 OPINION
ILLUSTRATION: BY TEKURA MAEVA