NASA's forgotten 3mm gauge movie camera

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/06/nasas-forgotten-3mm-gauge-mo.html

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This, this, is what all those tiny food things need to be shot on.

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Perfect for low-budget prequels!

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Area 51 has one too.

[note conspiratorial sarcasm]

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Makes no sense. But it is very cute.

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I like it.

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A recently as the Reagan administration spy satellites used to shoot film and drop it to Earth.

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Their film was more like 300 mm than 3 mm wide.

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Super8 has something like the practical resolution of 1080 (though, as I recall, with a square aspect ratio). So that means this would have something like a vertical resolution of 400 lines- or nearly SD. Which seems paltry now, but isn’t too bad, I suppose.

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Most of that extra was for soundtrack.

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This will be perfect for shooting ant porn!

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He mentions the AMIA conference. AMIA is the Association of Moving Image Archivists, people dedicated to preserving our legacy of motion pictures. They do good work.

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8mm is a bit worse than that. It is hard to do an exact conversion because it does not have distinct pixels, but it is much like SD, particularly in the blue channel.

The 3mm format used images 2.25 mm square, where the Standard 8 frame was 4.5x3.3mm so it was exactly half width. But it used black an white film, so the resolution is not limited by the dye cloud size of the colour processing (about 20 microns), so you could easily get double the resolution or more on a slow black and white film stock. If this was to be used in space or near space, there is plenty of light, so this would not be a problem.

It would be nice to see some footage.

Unlike the guy who shot that clip, I bet the tiny camera could at least focus.

Although today’s 3mm film was actually considered more like an 8mm gauge in the 1960s.

The hardest part was getting the carrier pigeons into those tiny pressure suits.

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The real question is where they found the tiny people to fake the moon landing.

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