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back to article Sony sends muso stratowards on vintage TV set

It appears that pretty well everything but the kitchen sink has now been dispatched stratowards under a helium balloon, and we can now cross vintage tellies off the list, thanks to a music vid featuring crooner Kelvin Jones and his ditty Call You Home. Director Joe Connor explained: "I created this video by sending a vintage …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Idiots

    Someone should tell these morons the Helium is required for serious matters such as research and developement and medicine. Teh amount of he available on this planet is finite, and should NOT be wasted on such trivialities as video clips or funny voices on TV.

    4 3 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Idiots

      Obviously never been to a "rave" after party, helium does have other uses plus Uranium is a common metal? Might as well say don't use oil.

      2 2 Reply
      1. Alan Brown Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Idiots

        Uranium is substantially less common than thorium - and thorium is a common side-product of rare earth extraction which is currently a "nuisance" material.

        Additionally, once you've extracted your thorium it's good to go.

        Uranium needs to be "enriched" (U235 content increased by tossing out some of the U238) which is hideously expensive/energy intensive (the exact costs and energy requirements of enriching for the USA civil nuclear program are a Classified state secret) and leaves significant quantities of U238 looking for uses other than "colouring glass".

        Uses which amongst other things include bullets(*) and bomb casings(**)

        (*)bad, as they burn inside tanks, producing uranium oxide dust which contaminates the local environment and Uranium is a chemically toxic heavy metal...

        (**)Doubly bad, as the bombs in question are "hydrogen bombs" and the U238 is used to boost the size of the explosion substantially (for neutron bombs, you substitute lead or tungsten for the U238)

        1 0 Reply
    2. Alan Brown Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Idiots

      "Teh amount of he available on this planet is finite"

      If "we" get LFTRs working and widely deployed that will be a distant memory. In fact there will be a lot more than we can actually be bothered using - He will be cheap enough that uses start popping up which are currently prohibitively expensive and/or not even dreamed of yet.

      2 0 Reply
      1. Martin Budden Silver badge
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        Re: Idiots

        If "we" get LFTRs working...

        If "we" get aneutronic fusion working...

        0 0 Reply
    3. Unicornpiss
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      Re: Idiots

      You kids keep off my lawn...

      0 0 Reply
  2. Mark 85

    I have a feeling the TV's were gutted and mere shells of themselves. If you're pulling some jiggery-pokery with creative editing, might as well save some weight. I'm just not sure why they did this though... and twice... although the link gives the impression it's a publicity stunt. If that's the case, why not just do it in a studio and play with some CGI?

    4 0 Reply
    1. Lester Haines (Written by Reg staff) Gold badge
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      Agreed about the TVs being gutted. They'd be far too heavy otherwise. I reckon it's nice to see some real footage from aloft, though.

      0 0 Reply
  3. Ralph B

    > I reckon it's nice to see some real footage from aloft, though.

    Pity it's all spoilt by the TV hanging in the way though, eh?

    What is nice is that the view is fairly stable. Not spinning around horribly like some <cough> balloon videos I've seen. Any clues how they achieved that?

    2 0 Reply
    1. LowRez
      Reply Icon

      Good Question

      One trick that could have been employed to help smooth out the shots would have been to shoot at a very fast frame rate. Say 200 frames per second. Then back in the edit suite you would play the footage back at the broadcast standard rate of 25 frames per second. This would provide a smoother shot. If the shots were still too jumpy you could add digital retiming effects in post to increase this effect. Extra stability could also be added by shooting at a higher resolution than the desired output broadcast resolution of 1920x1080 or 1280x720. Normal practice would be to place some fluro dots on the corners of the TV and shoot at say 4K. Back in post you would track the location of these dots within each frame. This gives you the jerky path of each dot over the duration of the shot. As you are outputting to 1920x1080 you place your 4K shot under a 1920x1080 output layer. Now all you have to do is keep the tracking points centred within your 1920x1080 frame. You have several hundred pixels of overscan in each direction on you jerky 4k layer to soak up the jerky movement.

      Its really late at night here and I only glanced at the video as the music didn't grab me. So with that taken into account my call is that most of this video is tricked in post. Yes some of the closer to earth shots are probably real but with the orbit shots etc it would be much easier to create them in post. They would also look better than a few Go Pros hanging off a weather balloon. Sure the director did launch two gutted TV's tied to weather balloons and some of these shots were interspersed in the final video. The rest were made entirely in post.

      0 0 Reply
  4. AndyS

    Any news on how they achieved "orbit"? I mean, I understand how they got into "space" (by a loose definition), but I'm stumped by the next bit.

    2 0 Reply
  5. ISYS
    Coat

    Great view

    Could he see LOHAN from up there?

    0 0 Reply
  6. Sparks

    So... how did they prevent damage to anyone on the ground when dropping a TV case from 60,000 feet up onto terra firma?

    0 0 Reply
  7. People's Poet

    I've seen some bad post editing before but that is definitely up there with the worst.

    0 0 Reply

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