View Single Post
  #34 (permalink)  
Old 24-August-2007, 08:19 AM
BertL's Avatar
BertL BertL is offline
Established Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: the Netherlands
Posts: 621
Default

Given that the framerate of the Apollo films (as far as I know) is 30, and the square root of (9.81 / 1.655) is 2.44, you'd need a camera capable of capturing about 73FPS (frames per second). I read in a book that the most early films were first made with a framerate of 48FPS, and then got reduced to 18FPS. For comparison, a motion picture film is shown at 24FPS.

It is not at all impossible to film something at 73 frames per second. In fact, cameras that are able of higher framerates (like 48FPS and 72FPS) are used in the production stages of films to later play it back at 24FPS (slow motion!). However there are some problems to be noted. To sucessfully capture light with higher framerates you will need either a faster shutter speed or a bigger aperture.

One can expect to see effects of this. A faster shutter speed shows differences in lighting every frame with a lot of artificial lighting. For example, when I point my webcam at my LEGO set and use a fast shutter speed (1/200), you can see the "flickering" of the lamps (most lamps don't shine all the time; they flicker at a quite fast rate, too fast for our eyes to notice), making each frame have different brightnesses. However this problem is usually solved by using a 'stage lamp', that simply doesn't flicker (it produces a lot of heat though).

A bigger aperture changes the field of focus. The bigger the aperture's hole, the more 'select' the field of focus will be: you can only focus on a small part of the image. A good example of this can be found here, on the Clavius.org website. Of course, in the case of the Apollo footage there is hardly 'alternative' shutter speed/aperture settings to compare things to.


Last of all, something else that has to be considered is for in order to fake the framerate in 1969, one would have to film it 'on film' first with a (calculated) framerate of 73FPS, and then slow the framerate down to 30FPS when showing the film. The audio and video must be matched up together, something that is made a lot harder because of the changed framerate. This indicates that in order for it to work, the footage and audio would have to have been carefully scripted and recorded far in advance of actually showing it.

As there are some instances where things in the news are being asked from the moon (I can recall reading something about an astronaut asking for the results of a baseball/football match), something which would be VERY hard, impossible even, to script out beforehand.

But to answer your question in a short way: Basically, it was able to make the technology, however there are a lot of things to be taken into account when looking at the scenario..


Well, enough typing in the morning for me right now. There may be some things I have said wrong; I'm not an expert, I'm a hobbyist.

- Spread the Love
__________________
Spread the Love!
Reply With Quote