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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

I suspect this is a frequency thing. Early SpaceX broadcasts were pretty rough. NASA just doesn't do launch coverage with the same sort of cadence.

Honestly, they should consider outsourcing that bit.

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I think this is a “you have one job” kind of thing for shooting liftoff (no matter what quality of equipment is on hand): rocket goes up, tilt camera up.

Bonus: Try to match the speed of the tilt with the speed of the rocket in the frame.

They did that with the Apollo 17 LEM lift-off

https://www.redsharknews.com/technology-computing/item/2742-...

If I saw that in any other context I would have assumed it was a low budget special effect--mostly due the spray of rainbow sparkles when the module separates from the base.

It's a sequential colour camera, each field is red, green or blue filtered (using a spinning colour wheel), and they're processed back on earth to recombine them into a colour TV picture. Doesn't work that well with fast motion, as there's too much movement between the red, green, and blue images, hence the rainbowing. They were of course bandwidth limited so conventional NTSC might be an issue. Also a normal colour TV camera at the time used three (or four) image tubes, rather than the one in the Apollo cameras, which would have added size and weight (this is before things like CCDs were practical).

We can send a man to the moon, but we can’t have HD footage of the man going to the moon.

/s but not really

We are a pretty quirky species when you think about it. This comment right here is kinda why I love humans so much.

SpaceX had a lot of rough footage before they figured it out and they have many more tries to correct it

Okay but the live stream for YouTube used a dslr live feed which I guess they didn't tell the camera operator for lift off because they started to snap still shots and the video feed had a visible shutter and then still frame for 1 second in the video feed. So to reiterate the official nasa YouTube stream ruined the lift off video stream.

Was going to say, I think everyone forgot about early SpaceX product quality.

And NASA probably does have great video of it available, it’s just the live broadcast that missed it.

> I think everyone forgot about early SpaceX product quality.

This was 8 years ago and is one of the greatest stuff I've seen in space launches. The footage is so epic that it even got replicated in SciFi series! ... https://youtu.be/wbSwFU6tY1c?t=1313

This was 9 years ago, first droneship landing - https://youtu.be/7pUAydjne5M?t=1642

And this is 18 years ago, their first Falcon1 launch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bET0mRnqxQM

More live video from the ascent than we got on Artemis2 for sure...

So this illustrates my point quite well.

The F1 launch doesn't follow the craft and freezes as it launches. No telemetry, fancy overlays, practiced presenters, etc.

The first droneship landing and first FH flight are both long into SpaceX's evolution of how they do these videos. Today's are even slicker.

Practice has made these improve dramatically, and today's SpaceX demos blow each of your examples out of the water. That's what doing a live cast every few weeks gets you.

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