Cheap Challenger Disaster & Investigation (Video) (Nasa-25 Years) Price

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Customer Reviews of Challenger Disaster & Investigation

Avoid Madacy Productions--this is proof of the advice
After viewing several productions of Madacy Entertainment, I have found a common thread among all of their works--including this one--old material and poor production. I even got one DVD from them that had the right label on the disk, but the content was entirely something else. Their productions are cheap and apparently intended to loosen the customer's wallet, while providing a very low-quality product.

Advice: Avoid anything with their name on it.

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Rare footage that everybody should have - But poor quality
First of all, hats off to Madacy Video for compiling such rare historical NASA footage. I'm pretty sure that that they did their best to obtain the best quality possible.

I'll talk from an eye of a television broadcaster, which is my full-time job. I'll leave the historical part to somebody else. It appears however that the info is good.

As far as the technical quality is concerned, I have to make the following observations:

The DVD mastering itself uses too much MPEG-2 compression and a low data rate. As a result, some artefacts occur such as blocking.

The type of analog video dropouts suggests that the material contained in this DVD was compiled from a variety of ANALOG sources such as VHS and U-matic 3/4".

One the first DVD, the footage was mastered to DVD from VHS and the audio used is from the normal linear mono audio track. The film was transferred with a film-chain 5-blade projector connected to a camera via a multiplexer box. - This is the cheapest film transfer. Furthermore, the green hue in the picture suggests that the camera videotaping the projector was an old misaligned tube camera.

On some other footage obtained by more professional formats, the picture quality is OK.

I have to point out that ALL the footage is PUBLIC DOMAIN. This means that any company can go down at NASA, get the original films, transfer them and re-publish them on DVD, THE RIGHT WAY.

I hope that one day Madacy Video, or anybody else will re-publish these public domain films the Right way. I've seen some clips of these same films transferred to video with a datacine film scanner, and the quality is simply amazing. I don't know why Madacy chose to go towards the easy way compromising seriously the quality.

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Great Collection for Space Buffs
This is a collection of official documentaries from Project Mercury through the Challenger Disaster (or Conspiracy if you wish!:-) Some of the older documentaries are funny to watch, as some of the dialouge is way way way out of date!

The 25th annaversary is the last documentary in the collection, so it barely includes anything on the ISS ecept for a few refernces to "Freeedom" the early version of the station.

All in all this is an excellent resource for educators or anyone wanting to know more about NASA.