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The Secret-est Nuclear Weapons Test

One way to measure human advancement is by examining the past. The past is rich with videos like the one featured here, where we catch a glimpse of the way we'll likely look back at ourselves now, in 50 or more years. Sobering isn't it? If not...

One way to measure human advancement is by examining the past. The past is rich with videos like the one featured here, where we catch a glimpse of the way we’ll likely look back at ourselves now, in 50 or more years. Sobering isn’t it? If not comically strange.

From the Internet Archive

Observers of this film cannot reasonably demand more in quality for this film, and the public is fortunate just to be able to see these films. This film release was not designed to present this film without flaws due to aging and the notorious instability of its original Kodachrome I color film stock. This secret film has been sanitized, with secret portions removed, after the complete version was locked away for decades in top secret vaults, where the unsanitized version remains to this day. The celluloid version of these films are increasingly brittle and very few people have security clearances to view the unedited versions that contain jealously guarded secrets to this day.

The pale, yellow banding was caused by a persistent technical error of the Department of Energy in transcribing from the sanitized Betacam SP master copy’s colorspace to VHS format.

The blurriness of Kodachrome I films was attributed to the immense grain of very slow 16 mm ISO 10 color film, as well as the bleeding of dyes in the celluloid. These films were so slow that night scenes had to be simulated using blue filters in daylight. Blue dyes were the least sensitive to light in this stock, and therefore simulated darkness using blue filters. Notice in 1950s cowboy films that night scenes contained long shadows and bright highlights from sunshine, due to this technique of low light simulation required by Kodachrome I.

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