OK, so I shouldn’t let stuff like this bother me. But it does.
(Disclaimer: I really like both CSI shows, and enjoy watching them, but … :mad: )
CSI (and CSI: Miami) and maybe a few other of the “scientific detective” shows seem to have some wonderful technology for video manipulation.
In a typical episode, one of the scientists will pull up some video footage from a surveillance camera or someone’s home video or whatever. Grissom/Horatio/someone will say, “oh what’s that in the corner? Enlarge it, please”. Aforementioned scientist will drag a selection box over the area, press a button and the selected area will enlarge to fill the screen. So far, so good.
But then, he or she presses some other button and the image detail in the enlarged area magically appears in crystal clarity. Sometimes, we’ll see this happen two or three times before the clue is seen, and often the clue is a small area of the multiply-enlarged picture data.
:smack:
Now I’ve been playing with digital images for a while, and seem to be missing this capability. In the real world, the data isn’t there, so enlarging the pixel will merely give you a larger view of the same crappy data. And this bugs me, I don’t know why.
TV may be many things, but it most certainly isn’t the real world. So I wouldn’t give much, if any credence to anything a fictional TV show portrays as “real-world technology.”
This is nothing new. Almost every TV show or movie with a plot involving security camera footage features some kind of “digital enhancement” to blow up tiny details.
While there is some technology that appears to make digital images more detailed (such as Scale2x), it can really only guess at the missing data.
I think what bugs me about this particular thing is that, unlike the tires that squeal on gravel and the computer viruses that make your screen melt, this is a goof that often serves as a major plot point. It ruins the movie (or episode) because everything that proceeds from that point is now impossible.
I just saw a Pretender episode on TNT the other day that had Jared manipulate a photograph so that the face of a man who was hiding behind a thick backdrop was as recognizable as if he’d been in the foreground of the shot.
My poor mother asked me, “They can’t really do that, can they?”
Yeah, there’s a lot more information in a blurry videotape than the human eye can see. I saw a program (NON-fiction) with a part about computer manipulation of videotape, and it showed how they took a typical blurry low-quality tape and were able to make blurry faces recognizable and relatively sharp and figure out what objects are that only appear as a smudge moving across the frame for a fraction of a second. The part that was supposedly revolutionary (as opposed to the usual noise filtering) was how the computer could take the apparent speed of the blurred object and figure out what exactly would leave a blur like that. I don’t think it would work on a still frame, you would need several frames.
This is not a defense of what has been done in TVs and movies since at least the early '80s (though that infamous bit in Blade Runner might actually be plausible if it was some kind of futuristic holographic image he was scanning). Just pointing out that there is more available than just sharpen filters and what they can do with pictures can be surprising.
Then there was Demolition Man. Somebody was analyzing a photo that he had scanned into a computer. He says (paraphrasing), “Everything in this photo is fake, except for the boy.”
Then he pushes a button and the fake background fades out and the original background fades in. :rolleyes:
Oh crap. I just admitted that I watched Demolition Man.
Okay, now I can believe that by using multiple frames and some fancy algorithms, a computer could figure out what was probably there to create a particular image, like the technology that Badtz mentioned.
But the one that made me grind my teeth was when they took a grainy home video and zoomed in to a kid’s pupil to see the reflection of whoever else was in the room.
CSI certainly exaggerates the present capabilities of many technologies.
They also sometimes get their science dead wrong. In one episode William Peterson’s character explains to one of his coworkers that a person inside a car that was struck by lightning was protected from the lightning strike because the rubber tires insulated them from the ground. And it’s funny because you always hear the stars of these shows brag about how accurately they portray real science, but they don’t have a clue.
The point is I wouldn’t take a T.V. drama as an accurate source of information about current science or technology.
Well, it looks like this is being hijacked this into a “CSI Technical Inaccuracies” thread, so I’ll point out that they get all kinds of stuff about guns wrong. I don’t mind background stuff as much, but the way they’ll hinge the whole episode on something that’s just wrong gets to me.
MILD SPOILER WARNING
In a recent episode they had a guy with a distinct burn mark on his neck from being hit from an ejected shell casing while shooting his gun gangsta style (sideways). It was a signficant burn, it was around the next day and IIRC even when they came back a bit later, and somewhat large and very discolored - he was black and you could pick it out easily. They even gave a ‘what happened’ shot of how the shell casing hit his neck, you see it come out of the pistol and bounce off of his neck. So what’s wrong with that? Brass ain’t that hot! I’ve had shell casings pop into me from the divider while shooting at an indoor range, and people who shoot highpower (rifle) matches routinely get hit by a whole mess of casings, with the occasional one going down a shirt. It’s kind of annoying, but it also isn’t going to leave a mark, much less a big nasty burn, unless you managed to get it stuck against one piece of skin somehow. Since they used the burn mark to identify the guy as being the shooter, I got irate at that part of the episode.
ANOTHER MILD SPOILER
Then there was the episode where a guy shot another guy using a bullet made from frozen hamburger. First of all, they managed to identify that the gun used was a .38 and not any of the ‘within a hundreth of an inch’ family such as a .357, .380, 9mm, etc. - despite the ballistic differences between lead and frozen meat. Then, they found that their suspect had a ‘registered .38’ and later found significant evidence on the reloading equipment in his house. While not a technical problem, I don’t know of anyone who reloads their own ammo and has only one gun - reloading is something you do when you shoot for a hobby or in competition, not if you do occasional plinking or hunting, or have a gun for self-defense. It’s one of those things like having a veteran RPGer who only owns one set of dice; it’s possible, but you never see it IRL.
Well, its not so strange considering you can have bullets made of pure porceline (called China Dolls) and bullets made entirely of Ice (liquid nitrogen).
I’m also reminded of one of Kevin Costner’s few good movies, 1987’s No Way Out.
In that movie, the one piece of evidence that had was the “back strip” of a polaroid and they were somehow able to piece it together to get the photo of Kevin, incriminating him. Except we are told that the computer has to “piece together” and “guess” what the final image is… and they start with the photo of a Gorilla but somehow end up with the exact polaroid that was taken.
Ahh, but do those people just play occasionally, or do they write up their own house rules and campaigns and generally fiddle around with the way the game works? “Veteran Gamer” might not have been very clear, it’s the guy who fiddles around with house rules and compares systems that would be equivalent to a reloader, who fiddles around with different powders, loads, bullets, etc. to get exactly what he wants.
