Film, not tape.
The Earth in live transmissions matches satellite photos of the same few hours.
But they could not have faked it live. For example, 2001 a space odyssey took 2 years to make 2,5 hours. Plenty of Apollo missions have a single EVA longer than that. It was not possible to edit things on the fly as the audio, video and telemetry came in from the moon. That is not possible even now. Otherwise, interactive, live Sci-fi shows would exist.
Lets start with one thing:
Apollo hoaxers say all the live footage was sped up. Alright. How did they do this live, without distorting voices, with fooling all the receiving and transmissions stations and all the private radio people that were receiving signals, while also fooling the people at mission control, including the computer complex.
You are correct in that nearly all the photos were on film a lot of which was shot on an incredible Hasselblad with a Zeiss lens. A beauty of a camera. I was the ships photographer on my boat and we had a couple of nice cameras but nothing like the Hasselblad 500.
However, there was quite a bit of magnetic tape that had Apollo video. The Apollo missions had TV cameras that transmitted video to earth which was recorded on one inch analog magnetic video tape. These tapes were scanned and converted to NTSC for broadcast.
Mike
That is video, not photos.
I wish they used a sophisticated convert method like that, which would most likely have made better results. Instead, the sstv signal from Apollo 11 was displayed on a screen at the ground stations. Pointed at this screen was a NTSC camera.
That is how the converting was done, at least on Apollo 11. I don't know how, or if it was done on later missions. Later missions had more bandwidth and didn't use SSTV for video. Either way it was a crappy way of doing it, and now the best photos, and a short 8-mm clip of the screens displaying the SSTV signal is the best we have, and will most likely ever have. Unless someone finds the missing reels at a ground station or in someone's basement.
(If you don't count their DAC 16-mm camera, which filmed the first steps on the moon in colour, at a higher frame rate than the SSTV signal.)
of course you can (and plenty did) take a still from a live transmission and publish that, before the CM returned to Earth and the flown film was developed.