Removing dark streaks/smears from video?

[drbuzz0]

Hi. I hope this is the right sub-forum for this topic.

I've recently been working on a project to try to improve some of the video from the Apollo-11 moon landings. As the original telemetry tapes remain missing the only avaliable video is from recordings made of the televised coverage.

There are several quality problems with the existing video, but one of the worst comes from dark streaking which I'm told was caused by some of the amplifiers in the circuitry that transmitted the video from the receiving station in Australia to the international television feed system via satellite.

Notice that in these captures, the light areas of the lunar surface cause a negative smear effect onto darker areas to the right of the bright areas. This causes a dark smear across Neil Armstrong's shoulder and also to the right of where the Portable Life Support System hose connects to the spacesuit.

I've tried many things to reduce this or at least make it less noticable. I've tried using Avisynth filters, Adobe Premier as well as filters for Virtualdub.

What I want to do is try to clean that up so that I can move to the next step which is overlaying the recordings of multiple broadcasts to try to clean this up even more


I thought maybe I could isolate these areas because they are the darkest regions of the picture, but this doesn't work because if I try to replace just those levels, it causes a hard line and ringing.

http://depletedcranium.com/snapshot20090626224441.jpg

http://depletedcranium.com/snapshot20090626224519.jpg

http://depletedcranium.com/snapshot20090626224458.jpg

[rfmmars]

Yes this is caused when the amplitude level of the analog signal from bright white falls below the grey level of the next part of the scene. In fact what is happening is the signal is falling to the blacker than black level which is "sync black" and has a slow recovery time to normal.

[setarip_old]

@drbuzz0

Make your life simple and purchase the 2 DVD set titled simply "NASA", produced by Wilderness Films and distributed by Madacy Entertainment...

[drbuzz0]

@drbuzz0

Make your life simple and purchase the 2 DVD set titled simply "NASA", produced by Wilderness Films and distributed by Madacy Entertainment...

That will not help. All existing copies of the video contain these dark streaks. The video I am working with is actually not the official copy and it has worse streaks, but it covers a period of time that the archival footage does not.

Okay the long story:

There were two feeds being received by the main video center at the manned spaceflight center at Houston. One was from the Goldstone communications complex in California and the other one from the Honeysuckle Creek observatory in Australia.

The official recording is a kinescope recording of the official feed which only shows one of the two reception stations at once. The first 56 seconds of the kinescope recording comes from Goldstone. After that, it switched to Honeysuckle Creek. Thus, the Honeysuckle Creek video is not on the Kinescope recording for the first 56 seconds.

The video from Goldstone is too dark to see much because of an improper setting on a scan converter. Thus the first 56 seconds are effectively "lost" because the recording is almost unviewable it is so dark. All you see is shadows.

During this time, however, good video was received at Honeysuckle Creek. There exists one known recording of the video from that feed that includes that time period. It was on 2" video tape recorded at the video control point for the Australian receiving stations in Sydney. There is one other partial recording, but the quality is even worse.

The only possible way that Wilderness films could have a better copy is if they had located additional tapes whose location is currently unknown.

The footage I have I had to send away to Australia to get copies of. If there is a better recording of the first portion of the broadcast I'd love to know where it is.


But back on topic, can anyone suggest a way to lighten the dark smears?

[setarip_old]

If there is a better recording of the first portion of the broadcast I'd love to know where it is.Thought you might be interested - I just heard (on CNN) that NASA is paying a Hollywood firm to enhance the subject video(s) - and they have completed 40% of it. The entire effort is anticipated to be completed in two to three months...

[Ghitulescu]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090716/ap_on_sc/us_sci_moon_video/print

[Schrade]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090716/ap_on_sc/us_sci_moon_video/print

Those videos are stretched to 16:9 from 4:3. Booooo.

Download links to them: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/apollo11_hdpage.html