Atlantis Shuttle launch in 1080i. Wow!

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/index.html

NASA has a really fast site, too.

I'll have to check that out.

Did you see the Discovery Channel series, When We Left Earth ? It was excellent in general. But in a latter episode, they had a couple of shuttle launches that were filmed in HD. Simply incredible. I rank it *very high* on the scale of 'oh wow' HD content. Had an amazing amount of three-dimensionality to it. It looked like you could reach out and touch the shuttle. People talk about how really good HD video can almost be like you're looking through a window at the real world. This was like that. Simply superb footage.

I haven't ever seen a launch in person, but I would love to some day. $\:\)$

Are those the ones done by IMAX? Could explain the "three dimensionality" to it.

I'll have to run this up on the big screen at the office. If I remember.

Man, I have a pretty fast computer with a kick butt video card, and the 1080i video is choppy and stalls from time to time (after downloading it entirely to my computer)... I've viewed 1080i stuff before without issue, so I wonder if it is a codec problem or something. I tried Apple Quicktime and VLC and both are bad. Checked my CPU usage, and I am hitting spikes around 59% is all. Plenty of ram left over.... Bummer...

That sucks. I played mine back in real time (as it downloaded) on my newish mac laptop without any problems. The network connection at work is wicked fast, and the computer is no slouch, either. $;\)$

Windows Media Player (about the worst player I have) played it just fine... As did Nero Showtime... Odd that Quicktime struggled as did VLC which usually plays things that other players can't.

Originally Posted By: pmbuko

That sucks. I played mine back in real time (as it downloaded) on my newish mac laptop without any problems. The network connection at work is wicked fast, and the computer is no slouch, either. $;\)$

Ditto. I downloaded the 1080i version last night. Played perfectly in iTunes on my 18-month old Dell 1520 Core2Duo 2.2ghz Vista HPE 2GB nVidia 8600GT/256 notebook. I downloaded the file and played it locally, so perhaps that's the difference.

Then I let iTunes convert it to AppleTV format and played it on my 61" HDTV. Looked pretty good there too, though the conversion introduced a noticeable amount of digital blocking (I may have had a quality setting too low).

I'll say it again - if that launch gave you goosebumps, you've got to check out that When We Left Earth series. Same idea as that video, but a lot more footage (more close-ups), equivalent or better PQ, and DD 5.1.

I understand that Axiom's Tom Cumberland used to work for NASA years ago.