Michael Corvin

Anyone know anything about these sets? I saw them at Meijer the other night. $41 for each 3 disc set. DVDpricesearch brought up $37.xx shipped, as the lowest price. Kinda steep for 3 discs. But they looked pretty nice.

DVDPriceSearch details look off though. They only list the sets as one disc, and they list it as 5.1.(really?) I think that is hard to believe, if these sets are the original tv broadcasts and such.

Anyway here are the four sets:

Apollo 11: Men on the Moon
Apollo 8: Leaving the Cradle
Project Gemini: A bold leap forward
The Mighty Saturns: Saturn I and IB

So who has the scoop?

bboisvert

If you are interested enough in the subject matter to ask, then you shouldn't be disappointed.

They are -- in a word -- fantastic. Some aspects can get a bit monotonous, but that's because they are so compehensive. They include just about everything you could ever want.

For details, you can go straight to the horse's mouth:
http://www.spacecraftfilms.com/

smcguire

I'll give these a lukewarm review. I was excited about buying them, and all the reviews I could find about the SpaceCraft film releases were glowing (they were released by Spacecraft Films directly originally) - but in the end, I was a bit disappointed with these.

My main complaint is the video quality, particularly on the Gemini and Apollo 11 discs. Now, I'm fully aware most of the archival footage wasn't high quality videos to begin with, as it's 30-40 years old, and either shot in space on limited equipment by folks who weren't professionals, or by automatic cameras.

But in many cases, the video has been overcompressed - a lot of the Gemini and Apollo 11 videos run at bitrates of only 2.0-3.0 (out of 10 on my player), and it shows... there's compression artifacts and banding all over the place. It doesn't make the presentation attractive at all. The Apollo 8 and Mighty Saturns discs look better, because they contain less material and run at higher bitrates. And on all the disks, sometimes the video looks low contrast and washed out (the blacks aren't anywhere near black) - again, I realize they're old and probably look like that, but it seems to me they could have looked better with a modest amount of restoration work (heck, even I know how to digitally adjust the levels of faded video to make it look better).

Another thing that bothered me is that there's very little context for everything - it's sort of "here's all the video footage taken at this time" and that's it. I wish there'd been a booklet with some more explanations, or more on-screen text explaining what was going to be shown. There is audio on a lot of the videos, but often it doesn't have a give a lot of context either.

Other minor complaints I had were: Some of the launches and other material are presented as "multiple angles" and I think they would have been better presented as just a linear video with chapter stops. The launches are only 1 minute long in some cases - you're not too likely to want to switch angles back and forth! But to watch the launch as taken from another camera, you've got to start over and switch the angle, then go back and switch to another angle... And finally, none of the material on the Gemini disc has timecodes (so you can't tell how long anything is). Fortunately all the rest of the discs do have timecodes.

On the upside, there is an amazing amount of footage on these discs, a lot of it not readily available elsewhere. If you're a spacenut, you'll probably appreciate it. But to be clear, except for a couple of documentaries, the material is presented unedited and in real-time, without narration to guide the viewer (either they come with audio commentary given by the astronauts as they took it, or from a post-flight breifing). It can get a little dull - watching spaceships dock in real time is slooow! - but that's what the fast forward button is for. The Gemini and Mighty Saturns discs each include an hour-long documentary that's pretty nice and do help put the rest of the material in context.

To answer the question about 5.1 audio, the launches have all been remixed into 5.1 to sound more impressive - how authentic this is, I don't know - but the rest of the audio, which consists of just voices talking, is mono.

In summary, while I think it's fabulous that so much archival material has been put on DVDs and made available to consumers, I really wish some more care had been taken with the video, such as spreading it over more discs so it wasn't compressed so much, and I'm a little hesitant to recommend them as a result. I'm baffled by the reviews I've read that praised how good the video looked on these - it ranges from acceptable to bad.

I'm also not sure about buying the next sets - an insert in the boxes promise 6 DVD sets for each of Apollo 15, Apollo 16, and Apollo 17 in November. Can anyone say, based on the releases from Spacecraft Films, if they suffer from the same problems or not?

All in my opinion, of course. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone agrees with me or not.

By the way, if my thoughts haven't scared you off, the cheapest way to get them is to buy all 4 at once - a couple of retailers are offering all 4 sets together as a "megapack" (really it's just the 4 sets shrinkwrapped together, no special packaging). DigitalEyes.net has it for $115 + shipping (I ordered mine from them - that's only about $30/set), and DeepDiscountDVD.com has it $124.41 .

--Scott M.

Michael Corvin

Wow. thanks for the great review Scott. I hate to base a decision on one persons review but your points seem very valid since there are 10 hours of material on 3 discs. I was also hoping for a walkthough kinda deal with the footage, sort of like a teaching tool to learn all I can about the great space race, not just random video clips and documentaries. Sounds like you would enjoy it more if you already knew everything and just wanted video of it all.

Sounds like I will skip it, at least until I can find it 50% less at half.com or just a markdown.

milo bloom

I think I saw these at Best Buy Sat afternoon, they had the Fox logo on the spine, are they distributing?

davidvp

I'd have to agree with Scott on many of the points he made above in his very thoughtful post.

However, I don't really have any complaints about the video quality (perhaps I'm not as demanding, or just stupid about such things ).

However, one thing I really disliked about the Mighty Saturn discs was the lack of audio for about 90% of the 3-disc set. ALL of the many launch sequences shown are "NO AUDIO"....dead silent lift-offs. Yuck! (IMO)

When I watch the Shuttle (or in these cases, every single launch of a Saturn rocket), I want to hear the windows rattle. Seeing it in silence just doesn't do anything for me at all.

IMO, the STS-109 DVD (which appears to now be unavailable @ SpacecraftFilms.com for some reason) is the best one. There's audio for the dawn launch (beautiful), plus a nice 140+-image "slide gallery" of mission images. Looks terrific on a big-screen TV.





STS-109 DVD

Tigger

Michael, I picked up The Mighty Saturns for 35 on half.com and I absolutely loved it. It's amazing footage, the behind story, sound is incredible and the engineering that went into these monster engines blew me away.. I completely recommend it to anyone. 3 discs for 35.95 =12.00 a disc isn't bad at all considering the footage is straight from Nasa. Great deals on Half, I'd check their first.

BigT

I got all four in what is termed a "Megapack", but is really all four releases bound with cellophane. Price was $114 for all four, including shipping. Works out to $28.50 each - much better than Best Buy.

davidvp

What sound??
My set is virtually all "No Audio", including every launch. The ONLY soundtrack on the whole 3-disc set is on the 40+-minute documentary.

I refer to just the first "Mighty Saturn" 3-Discer ("The Saturn I & IB"). Perhaps you refer to the sound on the "Saturn V" 3-Disc program. ???

I was so disappointed with the I/IB set, I never bothered to order the "Saturn V" set. Maybe it actually has sound for the launches.

jblock

I purchased Project Gemini, Apollo 8 and Apollo 11. I passed over the Mighty Saturns because I had read that there wasn't much sound and also figured the launches on the other disc would be sufficient.

From a historical perspective, they can't be beat. One of their billed advantages has been that there would be no contextual commentary. All in all, I think they are a good deal, even though much of the stuff I'll only watch once.

On the Project Gemini, I thought the documentary was OK, but not something I'll watch more than once. I did enjoy the other two discs and their 16mm footage.

I like that based on the length of material, they were able to spread the stuff across three discs for Apollo 8 and it splits up nicely between TV transmissions and 16mm film. I find the 25 minute TV broadcast where they spend most of the time trying to center the Earth in the frame extremely entertaining. It's also interesting to hear the cabin talk during re-entry where Lovell (primarily) and Borman compare it to their Gemini experience and basically tell Anders what to expect.

Apollo 11 has better quality shots, despite the compression artifacts, but I find there's not a lot of continuity between the discs: they jump around the mission alot, even though I get the logic of the placement of footage on the different discs.

I'm very happy to have the three I bought, although I'm not sure how much repeat play they will get. It makes me rethink a blind buy of the upcoming 6-disc sets because I know it won't be cheap. At this point, I'll probably just get Apollo 17, since the quality of footage should be good and it was the last mission. I hope they include all the transimissions after they left the moon; the camera kept rolling for a while. Unless your a major fan, I'm sure these longer sets will get somewhat boring.

I hope they put out earlier missions at some point. I'm partial to Apollo 12, even though they fried the TV camera early on, I'm sure the 16mm footage will be neat. And, of course, an Apollo 13 set would be very interesting as well.

Jonathan

smcguire

Michael: You're welcome, glad you found it useful.

Milo: Yes, Fox is now distributing the Spacecraft Films material. They are no longer directly available from Spacecraft Films, at least to US citizens.

davidvp: Okay I'm glad someone thinks I'm not completely off my rocker. I'll admit I am kind of demanding. As I said, I'm willing to excuse a lot of quality defects due to the age and source of the material, but making it worse with overcompression was disappointing.

I noticed the STS-109 DVD has disappared from even their international catalog as well, I wonder what happened there. Well, hopefully it will be back some day. Your comment on the picture gallery reminds me that another nit I had was that the Apollo DVDs didn't include a gallery of the nice still photos from the missions. Of course, that would have just crowded even more on the discs...

jblock: I agree that the Apollo 11 discs seemed a little disorganized. Once again, a booklet laying it all out in context might have helped! I don't see how "no contextual commentary" could be a selling point. Maybe no forced contextual commentary would be one, but I for one sure would have been happy to have the option.

--Scott M.

Feathers McGraw

I just bought Apollo 11 last week, and would highly recommend it. I've only watched a bit of it, but have not been disappointed at all.

To me, it's a like a reference book. Herein lies likely the greatest achievement of the 20th century.

Michael Corvin

I am so interested in these. Maybe we could get a vote on which set is the best? Looks like everyone here is leaning toward Apollo 11. I may have to pick it up.

smcguire

If you were going to get just one, I'd say either Apollo 8 or Apollo 11. Apollo 11 obviously has more historical significance and more material, but more compression artifacts as well (the Apollo 8 set probably looked best out of the four sets). But the overcompression on the Apollo 11 set wasn't as bad as on the Gemini set, which was the worst of the lot.

--Scott M.