
Mars images rendered in 4K [video] - oscarpaz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEyAs3NWH4A
======
nobrains
_Interesting facts that I didn 't know before seeing this video:_

\- The opportunity rover captured a barren scene which was named Rub Al Khali
(Yes! On Mars!), named after the Rub Al Khali desert area which touches UAE,
Saudi, Oman and Yemen. (1) (2)

\- The video says that Mars rovers send back images (not videos) and then
those images are stitched together to create videos, because "nothing ever
moves on Mars". But I wonder how a Mars video will look. Maybe it will
surprise us (movements due to winds).

\- Mars has a lot of clay (i.e. it was once a watery planet)

\- Some videos took 1,000 images to make

\- There is a beautiful selfie at timestamp 6:41

\- There is dune named "Namib" on Mars, shown at timestamp 9:10, named after
Namib desert in Africa. (3) (4)

~~~
cryptoz
Mars is constantly moving. There are wind storms, dust devils, ice melting,
all kinds of things.

Here's a dust devil
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8lfJ0c7WQ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8lfJ0c7WQ8)
(again, it's still images to make a video) but not because "nothing ever moves
on Mars"!

Mars is constantly shifting and changing with its weather and seasons. Ice
caps freeze more, and ice caps melt more, water or other liquid flows down
hills when it gets warm.

More often than dust storms, a new robot comes down to land on Mars in firey
rocket-landing-fueled or bouncing-ball style. Movement.

Mars is constantly hit by rocks from space that create craters and push dust
up into the atmosphere.

I've never heard someone say "Nothing ever moves on Mars" because it's really
not true and a total lack of imagination. Maybe people think nothing moves
because we haven't sent video cameras yet? But...Mars is constantly in motion.

~~~
astroflask
Earlier this year I made a video[0] where I took two images which are
frequently posted on reddit that show the movement of martian sand over a day
and interpolated (with python and opencv) the movement into a smooth video.
I'm currently working on restoring some Apollo footage, but one of the pending
projects is taking the Curiosity descent sequence (at 4 frames per second) and
give it a shot at some nice quality, XXI century interpolation (we have some
very good algorithms now, or at least better workarounds the artifacts).

[0] [https://youtu.be/k7pfdFMVj-o](https://youtu.be/k7pfdFMVj-o)

~~~
garaetjjte
>give it a shot at some nice quality, XXI century interpolation

I think it has been done?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMntZ6_R78Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMntZ6_R78Q)

~~~
astroflask
The creator on that channel simply uses a DAIN application without pre or post
processing the images (either the base images or the optical flow maps).

I take a different approach and I can't say I haven't found issues (I have,
many, I'm working on them).

My goal is to reach a level where there are almost none artifacts (there are a
couple in that video at the start, when the shield is released and when there
are many large movements of the camera due to Curiosity dangling off the
parachute). As I said, I'm still working on it, and in between my other side
projects, work and quarantine I've been on a less-than-ideal situation.

In time, if I pull it off, I'll post it and I guess you'll see it.

------
majora2007
A lot of people bashing on this, but I think overall it's pretty impressive
just showcasing to more people what Mars looks like. I for one was impressed
and enjoyed the panoramic effect.

Crazy to think Earth might eventually look like Mars.

~~~
shakezula
Anyone bashing on this has absolutely no concept of the scales or engineering
that went into this. When I look at these images, even though I've known we
had them for a long time, I'm filled with a tiny bit of hope for the future,
something I haven't had in all of 2020.

~~~
astroflask
Some of the bashing is because of the over-the-top narration, and the script
saying things that are borderline lies. It's not the first time this images
have been seen. It's not the first time someone has rendered them in 4K video
(I'm pretty sure Astrum and Scott Manley have used some of these images
before).

When looking at the title at first I thought they had used an SR-GAN (or
modern variant) to upscale the images. And no, they just took the images and
pan over them. I wouldn't have liked the SR-GAN approach either, I'm not a fan
of it (to me it trades accuracy for good looks, and it introduces some
artifacts which, while harder to spot on video, are probably not really
there).

Also others have pointed out that it seems like basically monetizing public
domain images without putting some effort into it. Like another crows has
pointed out, they do work into writing a script, the narrator, and editing the
material, so that's not a take I like (and I'm also "in the same business" as
them).

------
kyriakos
what impressed me more about this video is how earth like an alien world looks
like. it may not have vegetation but there's nothing I wouldn't expect to see
somewhere on earth.

~~~
johnyzee
I believe the images are quite aggressively recolored and cleaned up. The
narrator states that the original images would be reddish and hazy.

~~~
rement
The cameras on the rovers are not the same as the camera on your phone or a
DSLR. Each camera has specific sensors for different wavelengths of light [0].
The images are really just the wavelength reflection intensity measurements
(think of it like RAW images on a DSLR but for more than just RGB).

The colorization is done by taking several of these images for wavelengths and
adding them together. For example blue is in the 450–495 nm wavelength, green
495–570 nm, and red 625–740 nm. The Mastcam on the curiosity rover is actually
two cameras with various sensors for different wavelengths (including
wavelengths outside the visual range). They can use these images to create
color images. You take the 440 nm sensor and give each pixel a value between
0-255 and display that with more/less blue. Take the 525 nm or 550 nm sensor
and make them green and the 675 nm sensor and make them red. When you combine
these you get an image that looks pretty similar to what it would look if you
were really there (It's called true color and false color [1]). This same
process is used by satellites as well to measure and classify things on Earth
from space. They way different surfaces reflect light in different wavelengths
help scientists classify things on Earth and Mars and all over the solar
system. (It's Okay to Be Smart on YouTube has a cool video about Infrared [2])

[0]
[https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/mastcam/for...](https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/mastcam/for-
scientists/)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_color)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srzniA8EKDk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srzniA8EKDk)

~~~
astroflask
One of Curiosity's cameras has a Bayer Filter Array and practically shoots
like a DSLR. You can download the (debayered) "raw" files which are simply
1408x1200x1 (channel, uint8) panes one under the other in RGB order. So
basically an 8bit grayscale 1408x3600 image that you can open with GIMP in
"raw image data (.data)" mode and fill in the data in the settings window.

But you are right that many times scientific missions will have monochrome
CCDs with a filter wheel on top (Cassini, Galileo, Rosetta, Dawn to name a
few).

------
MR4D
Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t this just the Ken Burns effect? [0]

Calling it “video” may be technically true, but lees interesting than Google
Street View (which is not video, but more interactive).

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns_effect)

------
magnetic
In my youtube quality menu, it only goes up to 1080p.

Is this really 4K?

~~~
sgt
In 9/10 cases you don't see the difference anyway unless you are actually on a
very large screen and you don't mind wasting the extra computing power.

~~~
crazygringo
If you're talking about a beautifully mastered Blu-Ray, then that might be
true.

But given how aggressively YouTube compresses videos, watching in 4K can
provide a huge improvement over 1080p even if your screen only has, say, 1,600
lines like my MBP does, instead of the 2,160 lines that 4K actually produces.
It's really about the clarity of textures and how lifelike they are -- it's
very noticeable. Of course, this also assumes you have good vision.

I also don't think anyone's too worried about "wasting computing power" here
for a short video.

~~~
cbsmith
That's curious. My observation has been that most of the streaming services
have really high compression ratios with 4k streams. With videos like this
one, which are built from still images, I imagine you still get significant
improvements in quality, but for content that isn't so easily compressible
(e.g. action movies), I've seen significant effects from compression in 4k
streams as compared to "regular" 4k source material.

As far as "wasting computing power"... I hear some people play video games
while watching movies... on the same machine. So that's probably what that is
about.

~~~
crazygringo
That's exactly what I'm saying, though.

Because YouTube (like other streaming services) aggressively compresses both
1080p and 4K, _but the 4K version still has a much higher bitrate_ , watching
the 4K stream on a 1080p monitor will be significantly better quality than
watching a 1080p stream on a 1080p monitor.

I'm not saying you won't see any compression artifacts at all, _of course_ if
it's an scene you will. But the 4K version is still noticeably _way better_
than the 1080p one, even in an action scene. It's a higher bitrate so there's
more detail no matter what.

~~~
cbsmith
Yeah, what I'm saying is that because the 4k streams are trying to convey more
entropy than the 1080p streams, I've observed that even though their bitrate
is higher, the resultant compression effects are far more severe, to the point
where the overall experience is better with 1080p, sometimes even if you have
access to the full 4k resolution. I've seen similar effects with audio content
(after a certain point, increasing sampling rate significantly more than
bitrate has a deleterious effect).

From an information theory perspective, you are obviously correct that there
is more information in the 4k streams and therefore you will get more detail
from them. My observation however has often been the opposite.

My attempt to rationalize leans towards notions that the lossy compression
techniques we use with video codecs still have significant impedance with the
"compression" in our neuro-opthalmologic system.

~~~
crazygringo
Oh now I understand what you're saying -- that makes sense. It's not what I've
observed, but I definitely can imagine how settings for the compression, or
what the algorithm concentrates on, could make that happen. I'll have to pay
close attention now! And your rationalization probably makes sense -- I read
the h.266 codec is supposedly focusing specifically on perception improvements
in 4K/8K, so it may be addressing what your'e perceiving specifically.

Funnily enough, this reminds me of what I did with JPEGs on websites when
Retina first became a thing. Instead of serving up different assets depending
on resolution, I discovered that serving up a 2x resolution JPEG to everyone,
with really crappy quality, was superior to serving up 1x with high quality.
For 1x screens, blockiness was inherently shrunken because of JPEG's fixed
block sizes, and for 2x screens the low quality was harder to perceive because
it was at a small scale anyways. How compression interacts with
scale/resolution is not a necessarily intuitive thing.

~~~
cbsmith
That's a brilliant conclusion on the JPEG hack, and yes, that's precisely what
I've observed. You really notice it if you compare to even 1080i with high
bitrates (OTA HD TV for example). It's weird.

------
throwawaysea
The music overlay really gives the video a nostalgic feel...even though I've
never been to Mars.

For those who had the same question I had about whether these are actual
colors, the narrator talks about the change in color between images and the
color correction done in post-processing around 5:45.

------
greenhacker
I appreciate the accompanying geologic info on various sediment and structural
explanations which is too often missing.

------
hijp
The narrator explains why getting HD video would be impractical, but I
disagree that we get the same experience from panning stills.

imagine seeing the swirling dust, shifting sands, the bumps and parallax from
a moving rover. that would be so cool!

~~~
cpayne624
Parallax, maybe, but no wind = no swirling dust or shifting sands, no?

~~~
jessriedel
There is in fact wind. Only ~1% as much air as Earth, but it's sufficient to
support phenomena like dust devils.

[https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2005/1...](https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-
nasa/2005/14jul_dustdevils)

Of course, it's very weak, so it couldn't push over a spacecraft or building
like in "The Martian", but I suspect sands shifts on a very slow timescale.
I'm not sure.

~~~
DiogenesKynikos
There are "dust devils" on Mars:
[http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/04/Dust_devil_...](http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/04/Dust_devil_on_Mars).

~~~
jessriedel
You just linked to the ESA version of my NASA link :)

~~~
DiogenesKynikos
I think I meant to reply to the person above you.

------
hnarn
I can't find a comment asking this yet, so I'll do it: where can I get the
actual images, not in a video? I'm assuming these images are in the public
domain?

~~~
jml7c5
Spirit and Opportunity:
[https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/multimedia/images/](https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/multimedia/images/)
(raw:
[https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/multimedia/raw/](https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/multimedia/raw/)
)

Curiosity:
[https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images](https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images)
(raw: [https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw-
images](https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw-images) )

------
SV_BubbleTime
I don’t know if it was a specific mission requirement to give the rover a
camera that conveniently functions as a selfie stick, it’s pretty damn genius
and gives the photos a lot of context and character.

------
coldcode
Being able to see the geology this way is really interesting. Something made
the channels you see, something ground the rocks down to a fine dust and even
made that huge sand dune, something tossed all those rocks around. I always
wonder if you drilled down 100 meters you'd find life of some kind.

------
oscarpaz
My first video post and didn’t add the required [video] suffix to the title.
Just realized about it, apologies.

------
dopeboy
Fascinating photos. I hope, sometime in my life, humans will be able to go.

If the rover can stream to the orbiter at 2mb/s, would it be possible stream
video to the orbiter and have it save in its buffer? Then it'd transfer to
Earth later on?

~~~
tsak
But only for 8 minutes according to the voice over. Which would come down to
960MB in an ideal scenario (2 MB/s * 8 * 60s).

~~~
nitrogen
Is that megabits or megabytes? Usually lowercase denotes bits, so I think
you'd divide that total data size by eight to get 120MB. With a good codec
2mbit/s is probably enough for low-motion SD or 720p video.

------
ridaj
Looks like Utah...

~~~
coldcode
Looks like the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is where NASA tests Mars things.

------
huhtenberg
Erm... is that a puddle of liquid @ 1:53 or am I seeing things?

[https://youtu.be/ZEyAs3NWH4A?t=113](https://youtu.be/ZEyAs3NWH4A?t=113)

~~~
martin-adams
It does look there's ripples in it, but I suspect that it's a pattern made
from the winds and the angle of the light causing the smooth effect

------
vagab0nd
There's a bird-shaped rock at 7:57 [0]

0: [https://youtu.be/ZEyAs3NWH4A?t=477](https://youtu.be/ZEyAs3NWH4A?t=477)

------
bawana
What was that blue sand made of? The rover left orange tracks so i guess it
was use a dusting of something. Ice?

------
amelius
Is there any "360 degrees" content, that can be viewed with VR goggles?

------
sabujp
can't wait until they find a trilobyte or horseshoe crab looking fossil

------
gt2
Would love to see some video from there, even if it's not hd or 4k.

------
clueless123
Wow! Looks exactly like the desert of Paracas in Peru. Amazing!

------
xwdv
Would like to see this as an Apple TV screensaver on my 4K oled

------
coronadisaster
Are those true colors?

~~~
DanBC
I think some of them are using the filters to show different minerals. But I'd
need to check.

Here's an example on the NASA site: [https://www.nasa.gov/image-
feature/revealing-what-lies-benea...](https://www.nasa.gov/image-
feature/revealing-what-lies-beneath/)

~~~
coronadisaster
I wonder if it would lower the resolution if they would remove fake colors....

------
grugagag
Anybody else getting 8k?

------
HorizonXP
I'm not sure if panning through static photos Ken Burns-style from Mars
qualifies as "Mars in 4K [video]". But I appreciate that it makes these
stunning images more accessible to more people.

~~~
jeffbee
Does this video make them more accessible? It seems to make them less
accessible. It's a video composed of readily-available images from
[https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images](https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/images)

~~~
greenhacker
At least they're panning at 60fps, decreasing tearing/seizures

~~~
ju-st
How do you get 60fps, it stutters at 30fps for me.

~~~
jml7c5
What hardware are you using? Even if your browser is taking advantage of a
hardware decoder, older ones may struggle with 4K@60.

------
scrollaway
This is a really cool video and I don't mean to detract from it, but seeing
how its 10 minutes and 8 seconds long annoyed me so much (and not for the
reason you think).

"10 minutes" is an ad milestone for videos on youtube. I _systematically_
click away and hide videos that are between 10:00 and 10:20 minutes long:
They'll almost certainly have been artificially slowed down to match the ad
requirements.

It's infuriating, and once you know about it, you see it everywhere. Anyway,
in this instance it matters a lot less as the audio is completely unimportant…

~~~
alex_free
YouTube just changed the ad milestone to 8 minutes, and this was posted after
this change.

~~~
Fiveplus
On the same topic, who determines the '10 minute' and '8 minute' time scale
perfect for engagement and how did they end up with these numbers?

~~~
scrollaway
It's the minimum length of time a video must be in order to enable mid-roll
ads.

The 10 minutes one seems pretty arbitrary, but to arrive at 8 mins I suspect
that Google studies how much time there needs to be so that mid-roll ads don't
negatively affect engagement.

(Shout-out to all the wonderful, brilliant engineers working on figuring out
how to minimize the user's reaction to cramming AS MANY ADS as possible down
their brain)

------
mrmarrocos
Looks awesome! I love this images. There is a documentary on NetGeo that
narrates this journey to Mars.

