Whenever I see videos from the moon, the video looks awful, not clear at all. And the audio sounds somewhat muffled and squelched.
I would expect that if anyone has a project that big and expensive, why not have high quality recording equipment? The video and audio should be crystal clear, so why is it so poor?
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Bob says
The money went on the transport costs, catering and life support. Making a video of the event was secondary and it only needed to be good enough to show the USSR that the USA had made it to the Moon. Transmission of the signal would have been limited by the available power for the transmitter, which would have been a small low power device, the received signal would be amplified on reception at the Earth station, along with all the noise. So that’s why the signal is poor.
However, not all of the pictures shown of the moon landing would have come from the moon. I find it very difficult to accept that after making all the arrangements to send someone to the moon with the associated costs and risks, that a back up system was not in place, just in case the equipment failed and the moon transmission could not be read. Yes, it is ‘conspiracy theory’ but I believe that man has been to the moon and the questionable material shown, ie the flag waving in the wind, is part of the back up material. Before you dismiss this as rubbish, ask yourself, ‘What would you do to ensure pictures were definitely available under any failure conditions?’
Big Daddy says
Small, lightweight video cameras at the time of the Apollo missions were not common. So there were some sacrifices in using one on the mission. The first is that the Apollo 11 lunar camera is a "slow-scan" camera. Instead of US standard 30 frames per second, the camera did either 10 frames/second in a lower resolution or less than 1 frame a second in a higher resolution.
The other problem is that showing that live would not have been a simple task. Live conversions were uncommon at the time. So the conversion process is imperfect. This is what was shown to the nation.
The final problem is that the original data from the cameras was stored on data tapes, not video tapes. At some point later, the tapes were erased and overwritten. So the available images of the Apollo 11 landing are converted copy of a low-resolution camera.