Footage of Curiosity’s Descent onto Mars Interpolated to 25 Frames per Second

PETAPIXEL ^ | August 27, 2012 | Michael Zhang

[SWAMPSNIPER]

NASA’s Curiosity Rover snapped photographs at 5 frames per second as it descended onto the face of Mars a few weeks ago. The footage that results when the images are combined into a 15 frame per second HD video is pretty amazing, but apparently not amazing enough for a YouTube user named hahahaspam. He spent four straight days taking the 5 fps footage and interpolating it to 25 frames per second. This means that instead of a video showing the choppy landing at 3 times the actual speed, his video shows the landing smoothly and in real time!

[SWAMPSNIPER]

pinglist

[UCANSEE2]

I’ll be jumping back to read and watch at the source article, but I wanted to THANK YOU first, for providing a thread on something other than political conventions.

[Darksheare]

An Undead Thread Tech&Science ping to something neat.

[Ronald_Magnus]

VERY cool. Thanks.

[SWAMPSNIPER]

Hey, I do it all the time!

[PogySailor]

bttt

[nicmarlo]

that’s cool. thanks for the ping, darks!

[Paradox]

Utterly AMAZING that anyone with the knowledge and time, can sit down on their home computer and do this. SMH...

[Darksheare]

Welcome!

NNB and I have a couple story bits that take place one Mars.
Neat to see how a descent looks “from the perspective of teh descendee.”

[Chode]

thx... very cool

[nicmarlo]

Yeah, that was cool to watch. :)

[berdie]

Very cool!

Thanks for the ping.

[Alas Babylon!]

Yes you do and BTW, THANKS!

[Jet Jaguar]

Thanks for the ping!

[GVnana]

I went to the original image sequence and started oding manual motion tracking, watching a crater here or there. I made sure I always had at least two data points at any given time so that I could reposition and rotate for fluid motion.
Then I copied that motion tracking data to some null objects, and told after effects to interpolate the data in between using bezier curves.

Oh, I hate people like that.

[philman_36]

Direct link to video...@Complete MSL Curiosity Descent Interpolated HD

[dr_lew]

Oh, I hate people like that.

I know what you mean, although I did use a Bezier curve to draw Bubba's winning shot at the 10th at Augusta onto a Google Earth screenshot, so you know, really I'm right there.

[castlebrew]

Marvelous!!!!

[NCC-1701]

What’s neat is that you can track the heat shield almost until it hits the surface. You can track it until :46 into the film. The Curiosity jerks around and yaws right and you lose sight of it. Still, that was great work for four days of effort. The next lander should carry a video camera that records the landing in real time for later uplinking to Earth. Better yet, carry two cameras so there would be two angles of the landing. Might be a nice engineering tool to boot.