But this used to be played straight in detective, spy and sci fy films. A bunch of law enforcement or agency types gather around a computer screen showing a video of a crime or something suspicious. Then the tech will keep zooming in and “enhancing” until the object in question was clear enough to see. Sometimes the computer would say “enhance” while other times the head investigator would tell the tech “enhance sector whatever”.
I recall it was used in Clear and Present Danger (or maybe Patriot Games…or both), as well as Blade Runner. Anyone remember any earlier instances?
On as side note, I actually got to use this joke IRL with real cops.
I can’t beat Blade Runner, if it’s really in there (don’t remember it), but Captain Picard used it in the STNG episode arc with Spock. He tells the computer to ‘zoom and visually enhance’ in on a Romulan in a crowd, who turns out to be Spock.
It’s not entirely bogus, just poorly understood by Hollywood scriptwriters and hence often portrayed in ways that really are bogus.
NonBogus example a: from a color photo, examine each color channel separately. Some may have less noise than the others, hence allowing one to see detail otherwise not apparent.
NonBogus example b: from a video stream, interpolate from a sequence of still frames, retaining image data that appears to be present in most still frames, discarding image data that is present in only a few. This was used (to give one example) on the magruder footage of the kennedy assassination, interpolating the footage that had the repository window in the frame.
NonBogus example c: from a photo, scan it at high resolution and play with contrast and brightness values. No, it won’t create detail that wasn’t in the original, but it can make detail that the human eye didn’t previously see very well before pop out much more vividly.
It was also parodied in the second episode of Red Dwarf - Back to Earth - probably specifically parodying the Blade Runner usage, since BtE references Blade Runner a LOT (the character they’re using the trick to track down was based on Hannibal Chew, for instance). By the time they’re finished uncropping, zooming, rotating, and enhancing, they’re looking at a reflection in Chris Barrie’s H of a reflection in a water droplet of a reflection on a glass door at a card that has the address they’re looking for on it.
One of the earliest movies I can recall using this trope was No Way Out in 1987. It was presented as it being possible for a computer to “enhance” an illegible picture but the process took hours to complete. Which was a plot point in the movie because Kevin Costner was the investigator in a case and knew that a piece of evidence was a photo of him and he would be implicated when the enhancement was completed.
Mel Brooks High Anxiety had a lo-fi version of this gag, where a guy takes a photo and keeps blowing it up bigger and bigger, trying to see a small detail in the background. He ends up standing on a step ladder in front of a gigantic, twenty-foot tall poster of the photo, starring at it with a magnifying glass.
And here’s the TVTropes page. I suppose one could try to find a date earlier than 1982 in there. The earliest I see is High Anxiety (1977), but I haven’t seen it to know how “orthodox” it is actually vs. the description.
The actual use of the word “enhance” is likely inspired by the CSI/NCIS/L&O/etc. shows, not that one of them necessarily was the first.
I had to check this to verify it, but there was a TV series from 1972 called Search, where the agents were equipped with cameras in their rings and microphones in their tie tacks, that sort of thing. The sounds and images were beamed back to headquarters, where everything was zoomed and enhanced.
From what I remember, the first software to do that was invented by NASA scientists to analyze the video footage of the Challenger disaster. And unlike most other NASA stuff, some bunch of jerks in Boston called Salient Stills bought exclusive rights to the technology and are selling this taxpayer-developed software back to the taxpayers by selling workstations equipped with it to various law enforcement organizations.
It really rankles. I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked to extract a still from video, and have had to tell my client “Got $50,000?”
