Interpolated Video Of Curiosity Landing Is Breathtaking

  Mars Curiosity Rover

Enthusiast Dominic Muller recently posted enhanced video of the Mars Curiosity landing compiled from the initial NASA images.  Tweening the frames from 4 to 25 frames per second, the new video provides a stunning view of the decent of Curiosisity to the surface of the Gale Crater.

Afew days ago, NASA released the full-resolution video of the Curiosity rover touching down on the surface of Mars. While beautiful and clear, the images were only captured at about four frames per second, resulting in choppy footage.

Now, using an editing technique known as interpolation, redittor God22 (aka Dominic Muller) has artificially boosted the framerate of Curiosity's descent footage from four frames per second to 25 frames per second. Also known as "tweening" (short for Inbetweening), interpolation involves rendering missing frames artificially, to give the appearance of smooth transitions between actual frames. It's still playing in real-time, it just appears much, much smoother.

Muller gives a brief summary of the editing process in the comments section of his reddit post. He claims he worked for four days straight to assemble the footage:

I downloaded the 1648x1200px pictures [that comprise Curiosity's descent footage] fromhere and imported them into After Effects as an image sequence. Then I stretched the image sequence to run at 25 fps which resulted in a legit frame being copied 4 times until the next real frame came. At this point, 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 (Wikipedia Link). Here is a picture of that progress. 

Well, this wasn't quite enough because I needed the difference in movement between frames, not motion overall, so I coded for position and rotation with After Effect Expressions...

SOURCE  Io9

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