Movie Cliché #351 Bites the Dust!

[major_clanger]

Watching Battlestar Galactica (the new version), up comes a scene where it's crucial to identify someone from a small, grainy digital photo.

"Can you zoom in and enhance it?" asks one character.

"Yessss...." replied the techie, "but it'll be difficult, take ages and might not show anything."

AT LAST! A SCRIPTWRITER WHO UNDERSTANDS IMAGE PROCESSING AND ITS LIMITATIONS! HALLELUJAH!!!

Ahem. Sorry. But the magic software that makes pixels out of nowhere is an increasingly common cliché - and it was Blade Runner wot started it - that really gets my goat...

MC

Comments

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

at least in Blade Runner it was meant to be holographic so it might have been able to capture more information.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

In the pilot of 'The Inside' there's a scene where the team are watching a streaming video feed, and the tech-guy is randomly pulling off stills and enlarging them whenever something interesting comes up. One of the other characters, slightly testily, says 'can't we do any better than this?' and the tech guy cooly shoots back with 'not without breaking the laws of physics.' :)

[soupdragon123.livejournal.com]

Blimey if you feel like this, don't ever watch 24!

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

That's sort of what I'd heard :-)

Apparently CSI and its offshoots make a lot of real-life forensic scientists pull their hair out. too. Not to mention lawyers; so prevalent is the inflated expectation of jury members as to what criminal forensics can or should achieve that it's been dubbed the 'CSI Effect'.

MC

[daveon.livejournal.com]

One of the things I regret is my father not living long enough to see CSI. The fingerprint technology alone would have had him screaming.

I dread to think what he'd have thought of biometric ID/Passports and the travesty of an indentification system they use at US airports.