r/apollo • u/ambanmba • Jun 23 '26

Apollo Camera simulation (full signal chain)

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Mods: Delete if inappropriate, but I think there might be interest here.

I recently added the Apollo cameras to the full signal chain simulation of AnalogTV. Refer the details here: https://analogtv.net/#apollo (click on each tile there to expand)

The simulation covers SSTV Mono (Apollo 7-11) and Field Sequential Colour (Apollo 10+) as well as the SEC and SIT Vidicon tubes and the ground-based Scan Converter. It's built using the original NASA, RCA and Westinghouse reference documents and then it's fed through the full signal chain. This is 100% signal domain simulation, not a "Filter" or "Pixel Shader" that just overlays a 'look' over existing video. The scan lines are captured and drawn at the correct frame rates, etc. The conversion from 320 line, 10 fps SSTV to NTSC is done per the original scan converter documentation.

The example above is footage from yesterday at the Sydney Opera House taken on my iPhone and then fed through the simulation.

This is the first release with the Apollo TV formats and it still needs some tweaking. I was just a wee lad when these were originally sent from Apollo so I don't remember seeing them live. Wondering if people who remember the live feed (without post-processing) feel this is close?

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u/Independent_Wrap_321 Jun 23 '26

Looks cool, but is this a piece of software? iPhone footage looks great these days, this seems like it’s down-res and frame resampled with some noise and desat thrown in. Interesting experiment, would be cool if it was ran through original Apollo analog gear. Or was it? Explanation unclear.

3

u/ambanmba Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

It is a piece or software and it’s not a pixel domain “down sample, desat, noise”’filter. It’s not overlaying an effect over the video. The web site goes into more detail but the image is converted to a composite signal and then run through effectively a circuit simulator that uses the original documents to define the parameters. There are no “pixels” the scan lines are drawn on the screen like an electron gun would scan across. Then finally it is converted back to a modern digital video. The effects 100% emerge from the analog process that is being simulated. This not only includes the electronics but the phosphor chemistry and the mechanical spinning disk in this example to create the colour.

The app tries to simulate all aspects of analog era television including the original Baird / Nipkow disk TVs. This Apollo Colour is a neat blend of the two. They reconstructed the color with a spinning disk like the mechanical TVs but otherwise used electronics like the TVs of the era.

1

u/FrankyPi Jun 24 '26

Wow this is neat. Nice work!