There’s no question that the Moon landings were real. I won’t rehash all of the reasons as we’ve done that repeatedly.
But this Youtube video, by sgcollins, has a new take on the whole thing. He claims that it would not even have been possible at that time to fake the videos we all watched live on TV. He seems to make a good case but I am not by any means a video expert.
A response to this was posted by Jarrah White.
Collins then responded to White.
For the sake of discussion; is Collins correct that the video could not have been convincingly faked using that era’s technology? Is his reasoning correct? Even if his reasoning isn’t correct, are there other reasons that it couldn’t have been faked?
The hardest part was probably the faking of the liftoff of the 363-foot tall 6.6 million pound Saturn V in front of a live audience. But somehow the bastards did it! Special effects FTW!
The video would have to have been in slow motion to simulate the low gravity.
The best we could do with slow motion electronic imagery (as opposed to film) was short segments of 30 seconds or so, which was done for sports instant replays. This was because, for slow motion, it had to be recorded on a magnetic disk and such disks could not hold much.
We could have done the slow motion using film, but that would have required hours of film without any of the unavoidable artifacts like hairs, scratches, or emulsion flakes, and no obvious splices.
I’m not so sure about the slow motion video part. Couldn’t they have done slow motion using video tape?
There must a be a thousand other differences besides slow motion that experts would instantly identify. And mere slow motion would not mimic the low gravity. That’s ludicrous.
Everything is different. The stance, the movements, the backgrounds, the surface, the way that dust falls, the edges of craters. The moon is a total environment that must interact in its entirety. Anybody who thinks mere frame rate can create all this can’t be reasoned with in the first place.
We had no idea what the moon looked like that up close and personal at the time. A lot of Moon Hoaxers say Kubrick was brought in by NASA to help fake the visuals, since he’d just released 2001: ASO. But if you compare the visual effects of the moon (which was state of the art in '68), to those we see in the Apollo footage, the 2001 shots are laughably wrong and fake looking despite their cinematic glory.
Also, convincing low-gravity is next to impossible to fake, and what’s seen in the Apollo shots are perfect, along with the way the moon looked then, compared to the various modern videos we now have of the lunar surface from rovers and satellites.
I know, it’s just hard to take this stuff seriously! I still hold Buzz Aldrin in the highest regard for punching the lunatic Bart Sibrel in the mouth!
Anyway, I’m pretty sure the videos could have been done from a technical standpoint with enough effort and a little innovative thinking. It could never have been done from an operational standpoint – i.e.- keeping the secret.
BTW, there’s a movie – a very bad one apparently – that I haven’t seen called “Apollo 18” that has an interesting fictional premise: that the real reason the Apollo program was terminated was not budgetary reasons, but because of Something They Found on the Moon. The conspiracy nuts could have had more fun with that one.
ETA: Points posted above about faking low-G duly noted – but there would have been nothing authentic at the time for the audience to compare it with – and I do have faith in cinematic technology!
Your argument sees to hinge on using a video camera to shoot live action. CGI was already being done then. The process would have been slow, but it it could be done. Read up on the camera technologyand what we saw on TV, it was in a sense faked because the camera didn’t produce a standard video signal and went through some crude processing.
We had plenty of video from the moon, if someone wanted to put in the time and money to produce convincing images they could have. As usual, there was no reason to fake it in the first place, and no reason to invest the time and money to do so even if there was a reason to fake it in the first place.
This was low-res, low frame rate video, and there was no shortage of computers and memory that would make it impossible. You can fake anything on video with enough time and effort. This argument is best concentrated on the motives and not the technology.
Computer generated imagery was around then, but no where even close to sophisticated enough to create any photorealistic imagery. It’s not even a question of slow computation; the software and ray-tracing shaders necessary didn’t yet exist.
Now that it has for decades, creating a convincing live-action lunar scene, with CG is still incredibly difficult, costly and time intensive.
The image quality is not that good. It would have required a great deal of hand manipulation. What you’ve seen was a low-res low frame rate image displayed on a CRT with high persistence phosphers that was then filmed or video-taped. The motion could have been derived from existing B&W videos from the moon. There’s never been a need to put the time and cost into doing it, it’s not a limit of technology.
I certainly agree that even if it was attempted there would have been artifacts that could show it was faked, but not because of the limits of technology.
I was working in TV in 1973. In just the four years since Apollo the technology had improved tremendously, but you couldn’t fake "anything, and I reject the idea that you can fake anything, even now. There are still things you can’t fake convincingly (fire being the most obvious.)
And let’s go back to the traditional answer. If any part of the moon landing was faked, why didn’t the archrival USSR call NASA out on it?
This thread isn’t about other arguments. Of course it was real. It’s self-delusion to think otherwise. I just think that there’s an interesting discussion to be had regarding the state of video technology at the time.
Was there a fire on the moon? There were frame buffers, and we saw a blurred image. If the budget and manpower used to put them on the moon was put into faking it you would have an extremely difficult time determining what was produced was a fake. And that time and money wouldn’t need to be used for better technology, just the manpower to tweak the images one bit at a time. That’s not a technology limit.
I don’t mean using the same budget and manpower, I mean the additional budget and manpower. We would have needed the actual video from the moon to get it right in a way that would hold up now. Without the actual video to work from the problem would be a lack of knowledge, not lack of technology.
