Wanted: Soyuz-Apollo Films

I'm running films at the Arisia science fiction convention in Boston this
winter, and we always run a nice mix of old NASA science films along with
the movies in our film room.

This year, in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Soyuz-Apollo
mission, I was looking at running both American and Russian films on the
project. Finding NASA films has not been a problem at all and I have a set
of about six in 35mm available to me.

There is a film called "Soyuz-Apollo Linkup" which was available for rental
in 35mm and 16mm from the Russian embassy in the seventies. They don't seem
to have a print of it any longer. The Russian state archive people have
come up dry for me. The Library of Congress does have an archive print, but
they have neither time nor budget to make a screening print that they could
rent out.

I'm looking for someone who may have some of the old Russian films in a
closet somewhere, who would be willing to rent or sell a 35mm or even 16mm
print of this film or a similar film on the subject. Surely there is still
an archive in Star City? While I would prefer English language dubbing or
subtitles, I don't think it would be a problem at all for us to provide
simultaneous Russian translation.

Anyone have any suggestions?
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

On 20 May 2004 19:46:02 -0400, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

I'm running films at the Arisia science fiction convention in Boston this
winter, and we always run a nice mix of old NASA science films along with
the movies in our film room.

....Well, someone's going to send you to me eventually, and since I"m
late for a photo shoot and just about to walk out the door...:-P

This year, in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Soyuz-Apollo
mission, I was looking at running both American and Russian films on the
project. Finding NASA films has not been a problem at all and I have a set
of about six in 35mm available to me.

....What's needed is for these to be digitally remastered and spun off
on DVD so that I can add new, clearer images to my ASTP page.

There is a film called "Soyuz-Apollo Linkup" which was available for rental
in 35mm and 16mm from the Russian embassy in the seventies. They don't seem
to have a print of it any longer. The Russian state archive people have
come up dry for me. The Library of Congress does have an archive print, but
they have neither time nor budget to make a screening print that they could
rent out.

....I went through this same mess back in January 2003, before
Columbia. The LoC also gave me the same runaround, although I will
point out they were *very* polite about it. I did ask if I could go up
there and grab some screencam shots from a makeshift film chain if
necessary, and they regrettably weren't too open to that idea.

Anyone have any suggestions?

....Better still, if you get any *answers*, I'd love for you to share
them this way.


OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

"Scott Dorsey" "Soyuz-Apollo Linkup" which was available for rental
in 35mm and 16mm from the Russian embassy in the seventies. They don't
seem
to have a print of it any longer. The Russian state archive people
have
come up dry for me.

Abamedia has the license for the Russian news film archive. Abamedia did
a PBS series using the contents. abamedia.com

OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote:
On 20 May 2004 19:46:02 -0400, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

This year, in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Soyuz-Apollo
mission, I was looking at running both American and Russian films on the
project. Finding NASA films has not been a problem at all and I have a set
of about six in 35mm available to me.

...What's needed is for these to be digitally remastered and spun off
on DVD so that I can add new, clearer images to my ASTP page.

I think a lot of that stuff is available on DVD. What I have are mostly
blow-up prints in varying stages of redness right now, but I think
a lot of these still have ECO originals in the vaults in Maryland that they
might be willing to strike new prints from. In general the 35mm prints have
done better than the 16mm stuff as far as going red.

I could probably pop some stills off with the optical printer here if you
wanted something in particular, though.

There is a film called "Soyuz-Apollo Linkup" which was available for rental
in 35mm and 16mm from the Russian embassy in the seventies. They don't seem
to have a print of it any longer. The Russian state archive people have
come up dry for me. The Library of Congress does have an archive print, but
they have neither time nor budget to make a screening print that they could
rent out.

...I went through this same mess back in January 2003, before
Columbia. The LoC also gave me the same runaround, although I will
point out they were *very* polite about it. I did ask if I could go up
there and grab some screencam shots from a makeshift film chain if
necessary, and they regrettably weren't too open to that idea.

The LoC _will_ do a video transfer for you, and the fee isn't all that
outrageous. However, because it's a color film with sound, for me to get
a 35mm print struck from the archive print would require them to make a new
sound negative and an interneg, for something between five and ten bucks a
foot. No 35mm dirty dupes any longer.

They are VERY touchy about letting people shoot the screen of the flatbed.
Their print is immaculate, though. Not a scratch, and amazingly beautiful
Agfacol... err... I mean Sovcolor. Wish we had that stock available today.

I think if enough people could convince them of the need, they might be
willing to make a screening print available, but it's going to be a long
fight.

Anyone have any suggestions?

...Better still, if you get any *answers*, I'd love for you to share
them this way.

How about 42, Thevenin equivalents, and the Chinese matrimony vine
(Momardica sinensis)?
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

On 20 May 2004 22:47:37 -0400, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote:
On 20 May 2004 19:46:02 -0400, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

This year, in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Soyuz-Apollo
mission, I was looking at running both American and Russian films on the
project. Finding NASA films has not been a problem at all and I have a set
of about six in 35mm available to me.

...What's needed is for these to be digitally remastered and spun off
on DVD so that I can add new, clearer images to my ASTP page.

I think a lot of that stuff is available on DVD. What I have are mostly
blow-up prints in varying stages of redness right now, but I think
a lot of these still have ECO originals in the vaults in Maryland that they
might be willing to strike new prints from. In general the 35mm prints have
done better than the 16mm stuff as far as going red.

....In Photoshop, the red can be adjusted a bit. It's the grain and
scratches that worry me the most, as well as whether or not the image
looks good at ~320x240 resolution.

I could probably pop some stills off with the optical printer here if you
wanted something in particular, though.

....Don't tempt me :-) I'd probably need to see those films, tho. I
also have done my own experiments in homemade film chains over the
years, but lacking a 16mm projector these days have hampered any
further attempts. It's not that difficult a process, and can easily be
done with a mirror and an opaque screen.

The LoC _will_ do a video transfer for you, and the fee isn't all that
outrageous. However, because it's a color film with sound, for me to get
a 35mm print struck from the archive print would require them to make a new
sound negative and an interneg, for something between five and ten bucks a
foot. No 35mm dirty dupes any longer.

....Yeah, reduping at 35mm is *not* cheap, but it's not too expensive
if you've got the cash to spare. At the time I looked into it, the
same issue existed - they needed to do the sound & internegs, and my
cash flow can't support that at this time.

They are VERY touchy about letting people shoot the screen of the flatbed.
Their print is immaculate, though. Not a scratch, and amazingly beautiful
Agfacol... err... I mean Sovcolor. Wish we had that stock available today.

....I've seen some really clean late 60's - early 70's Russian color
stock that put some of Fuji's best stock from the late 80's to shame.

I think if enough people could convince them of the need, they might be
willing to make a screening print available, but it's going to be a long
fight.

....Yeah, money's tight at the LoC these days. One day, maybe. ASTP
deserves far more recognition than it's gotten over the years. As I've
noted on my ASTP page, there's quite a bit of evidence that the
program cracked more of the ice that existed between the US and the
USSR due to the Cold War than any circle jerk sessions that Kennedy &
Krushchev and/or LBJ & Kosygin and/or Nixon & Brezhnev toyed around
with. The fact that both sides were able to overcome the cultural and
linguistic barriers in such a short time *and* manage to get the
Androgynous Docking Adapter working as well as it did despite the NIH
attitude that boths ides had to overcome demonstrated to all involved,
including the peoples on both sides, that coexistence was possible,
all we had to do was say "**** this, we're going to pull this off!"
and then just *do* it.

Anyone have any suggestions?

...Better still, if you get any *answers*, I'd love for you to share
them this way.

How about 42, Thevenin equivalents, and the Chinese matrimony vine
(Momardica sinensis)?

....I'll settle for that, so long as you make sure to badmouth Proxmire
and Mondale during your ASTP lectures. Those *******s deserve all the
derision they get.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote:
On 20 May 2004 22:47:37 -0400, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
a lot of these still have ECO originals in the vaults in Maryland that they
might be willing to strike new prints from. In general the 35mm prints have
done better than the 16mm stuff as far as going red.

...In Photoshop, the red can be adjusted a bit. It's the grain and
scratches that worry me the most, as well as whether or not the image
looks good at ~320x240 resolution.

The problem is that when the cyan layer is gone, it's really gone. You
can crank it up in photoshop (or in printing), but the S/N gets much poorer
and the grain and scratches get much worse (and bluer).

The LoC _will_ do a video transfer for you, and the fee isn't all that
outrageous. However, because it's a color film with sound, for me to get
a 35mm print struck from the archive print would require them to make a new
sound negative and an interneg, for something between five and ten bucks a
foot. No 35mm dirty dupes any longer.

...Yeah, reduping at 35mm is *not* cheap, but it's not too expensive
if you've got the cash to spare. At the time I looked into it, the
same issue existed - they needed to do the sound & internegs, and my
cash flow can't support that at this time.

Right. Their fee for B&W materials is actually pretty reasonable, since they
can just strike a dirty dupe off the original. This is not the case for the
color materials.

...Yeah, money's tight at the LoC these days. One day, maybe. ASTP
deserves far more recognition than it's gotten over the years. As I've
noted on my ASTP page, there's quite a bit of evidence that the
program cracked more of the ice that existed between the US and the
USSR due to the Cold War than any circle jerk sessions that Kennedy &
Krushchev and/or LBJ & Kosygin and/or Nixon & Brezhnev toyed around
with. The fact that both sides were able to overcome the cultural and
linguistic barriers in such a short time *and* manage to get the
Androgynous Docking Adapter working as well as it did despite the NIH
attitude that boths ides had to overcome demonstrated to all involved,
including the peoples on both sides, that coexistence was possible,
all we had to do was say "**** this, we're going to pull this off!"
and then just *do* it.

There is a lot less of that sort of attitude around than there should be,
and that's part of what always fascinated me about the whole mission.

It's also probably the last time NASA ever machined anything metric, too.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

On 21 May 2004 08:52:58 -0400, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote:
On 20 May 2004 22:47:37 -0400, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
a lot of these still have ECO originals in the vaults in Maryland that they
might be willing to strike new prints from. In general the 35mm prints have
done better than the 16mm stuff as far as going red.

...In Photoshop, the red can be adjusted a bit. It's the grain and
scratches that worry me the most, as well as whether or not the image
looks good at ~320x240 resolution.

The problem is that when the cyan layer is gone, it's really gone. You
can crank it up in photoshop (or in printing), but the S/N gets much poorer
and the grain and scratches get much worse (and bluer).

....I've learned that a 5% smudge tool at 5 to 10 pixels can do wonders
for scratches, depending on the scratch. As for the cyan layer, I've
managed to restore some of that in a rather time consuming process
that involves masking out what cyan is there, C&P to a transparent
layer, converting to B&W, then adjusting the contrast/brightness
accordingly, *then* converting back to RGB and colorizing it to a
light cyan. You have to tweak a lot here and there, but I've managed
to restore some then- 50-year-old Kodak color slides that way to about
80% of what they originally looked like according to the owners. I'd
be glad to show you examples, but I honestly never kept copies of any
of them.

....I will note that these were done in 1995, on very slow P60 box with
only 16Mb of RAM, and the processing took forever because of various
slow I/O factors, including the fact that the slide scanner I had
access to took about 30 minutes to scan just *one* slide, and batch
jobs were out of the question. The real time consumer was getting the
cyan channel properly masked, copied, tweaked and repasted. On quite a
number of slides, when the remastered cyan layer was repasted, the
edges had a pixilation mismatch that required the application of my
favorite PS tool, that 5% smudge I mentioned.

It *can* be done. The question is whether it's worth the time
involved.

Right. Their fee for B&W materials is actually pretty reasonable, since they
can just strike a dirty dupe off the original. This is not the case for the
color materials.

....Now there's the rub. They never told me that they had a B&W copy.
I'd have settled for that and done the colorization where necessary.
I've done this with some of the B&W shots on my Skylab Trainer page,
most notably where it needed to be pointed out quite specifically how
the trapezoidal curved Gemini hatch was mounted on a cylendrical S-IVB
stage without invoking the square peg vs round hole controversy.

There is a lot less of that sort of attitude around than there should be,
and that's part of what always fascinated me about the whole mission.

....Agreed. It was a true spirit of cooperation, and arguably the first
time they'd come together in such spirit since Elbe in 1945, not to
mention the only time I can honestly think they came together in the
spirit of peace with a peaceful action. The mission really deserves to
be given far more credit in the history books for making Detante
possible and thawing out the Cold War than it has.

It's also probably the last time NASA ever machined anything metric, too.

....Yeah, that's something I probably should mention next time I get
around to revamping the page, probably sometime later this year. I'm
planning on finally going back down to Space Center Disney and give
the exhibits down there the proper treatment, as I've got my new Canon
EOS 300 Digital Rebel - all you kids need to ask Santa for one of this
next Chrisnukkah, especially when the price goes down to about $799
with the 18-55mm lens, and make sure you ask for lots of Flash Memory
cards, because you *will* fill them up fast!

....Clarify me on this: what's your interest in this again? You're
giving a lecture of some sort?

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote:

...Now there's the rub. They never told me that they had a B&W copy.
I'd have settled for that and done the colorization where necessary.
I've done this with some of the B&W shots on my Skylab Trainer page,
most notably where it needed to be pointed out quite specifically how
the trapezoidal curved Gemini hatch was mounted on a cylendrical S-IVB
stage without invoking the square peg vs round hole controversy.

They don't have a B&W copy, they only have the original archive print.
I was just saying that if the original were in B&W, they could strike a
dirty dupe for a reasonable price, but since the original is in color,
they can't. There's no more 35mm color reversal print stock, and there
is no way to do sulfited sound tracks on color reversal any more anyway.
In 1970 they could probably have done color dirty dupes, but it is now
a dead technology.

...Clarify me on this: what's your interest in this again? You're
giving a lecture of some sort?

I run the film room at the Arisia science fiction convention. Propaganda
is at http://www.arisia.org. Last year we ran League of Extraordinary
Gentlemen, Star Trek: The Empath, Donnie Darko, Dan Smoot: Communism,
Confusion, and Christianity, the 1924 silent Peter Pan (with live organ),
LoTR: Two Towers, Robot Stories, Space Angel (episode 25), the 1973 Scout
Project Report, The Matrix, Reduced Gravity Simulation for Study of Man's
Self-Locomotion (a NASA/Langley film on simulating moon gravity with spring
loaded suits), Silent Running, Vibration Analysis using Holographic
Interferometry (JPL, 1970), The Rook (by Eran Palatnik), Star Pilot, a
short subject advocating private ownership of atomic weapons, and a couple
of cartoons.
--scott


--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."