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Comment by xattt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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They did that with the Apollo 17 LEM lift-off

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

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.

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).

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.

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