New Visual Media for Your Planetarium: Access to Videos from ESA, NASA and Other Sources

Abstract: A presentation of highlights from the recently finished IPS/ESA Laserdisk Vol.1, a collection of the best computeranimations and real footage of the years 1996-1999 from the European Space Agency. The presentation also includes a glimpse at what will follow next and at other video libraries in the making on the other side of the Atlantic Background In order to promote their endeavours and to inform the public, space agencies and other organisations funded by the taxpayers, are providing excellent videos for broadcasters worldwide. Planetariums could also be regarded as a special, and even interactive Television channel" (look at the word TELE-VISION...) providing in-depth information for a usually more dedicated audience. It hence makes a lot of sense for both the planetarium community AND the agencies plus other research organisations to look into ways how these videos and other high-end visuals could be playing on our domes for educational purposes. With this idea in mind, the author of this paper had launched an initiative during his presidency of the International Planetarium Society. towards regularly collecting all the many bits and pieces from many broadcast news reels provided by ESA and NASA. The intension was (and still is) to distribute material in the form of a collection/digest as soon as there is a sufficient amount in stock. And to do so in a cost-effective way, which one-by-one mailing of single bits and pieces certainly would not fulfill. IPS Laserdisks Each collection to be released by IPS for the planetarium community will be made available as laserdisk. Laserdisks are the most widely used video storage media in the planetarium world at this date. However, since the use of DVDs and MPEG-players will see a dramatic increase in the upcoming months and years, future volumes will be released as DVDs which also include the MPEG-compressed videos. This project is non-commercial and non-profit. IPS members will only be charged a very low price in order to cover the production costs, without aiming at any net profit. All manpower involved by ARTofSKY was voluntary work for the benefit of IPS. The first of this series of disks is focussing on material from the European Space Agency. Thanks to the support from ESA Public Relations Office at ESA Headquarters in Paris, more than 40 broadcast news releases were collected - and hence many hours of ESA PAL Betacam SP tapes were reviewed in the studio in Munich and finally edited on Digital PAL Betacam at MACKEVISION in Sindelfingen under the supervision of Michael J. Mueller (SamPl@y). The conversion of the final tape to NTSC was done using the best available machines at Guertler Intermedia in Munich. The NTSC Betacam Mastertape was then sent to Martin Ratcliffe in Kansas, who handled the pressing of the disks via an US-company. IPS Laserdisk Vol.1: The Medium The medium used to store this compilation has the following characteristics: Doublesided NTSC-Laserdisk videos stored in NTSC - converted from original PAL Betacam SP tapes supplied by ESA to IPS / ARTofSKY Sound (narration for some chapters / Soundeffects) Narration sometimes even bilingual (english & french) ns of ESA missions