Sep 16, 2012

Curiosity landing video gets sound, visuals enhanced to 1080p

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Any talk of space exploration in the future will always reference Curiosity’s mission to Mars and that awesome descent known as the seven minutes of terror. The fact that NASA recorded video of that descent and landing was just the icing on the cake, even though it was only four frames per second.
Ever since the original video became available to watch, talented individuals have been working to improve upon it. The first results of this enhancement were seen at the end of August when a 25 frames per second version appeared on YouTube. At the time I called it a masterpiece, but it has now been surpassed by the version you see above.

What you are watching is a 1080p version of the landing that, for the first time, has been given a sound effects to match the action. The man behind the video is filmmaker Brad Canning who has spent four weeks painstakingly enhancing the video using every technique available to him to get the quality up.
Canning lists motion tracking, adjustment points, detail enhancement, and color correction as just a few of the tasks he had to carry out. He even went so far as to split the video into two layers for rendering so as to up the accuracy and make that HD quality possible. The sound is, like the original video was, just the icing on the cake for this video. I can’t see anyone improving on this version and I’m sure it will make the rounds at NASA today.
You can see his making of video below if you want to see a snapshot of the footage enhancement process.
via Wired


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