Gunar's Site

Hahaha, this reminds me of a recent episode of Bones where they were reviewing mall surveillance tapes to find a kidnapper. They even went through a detailed explanation about how they couldn't blow up the image because it's 640x480 pixels and there was no way to get any more information out of it.

Not 10 minutes later they're looking at another scene on the tape and their whole spiel about the pixels goes out the window when they're magically able to not only see a face in a reflection on a glass door 100 feet away from the camera, but they're able to enhance the reflection so well they can get a recognisable face out of it!

Just when I thought I'd found the one show that didn't use magic in place of real science they had to go and dash my hopes.

It's so funny when they do this kind of tricks... My favourite one is when they can zoom into someone's eye on a photo, enlarge it to get from the reflect on the eye a full scale photo, then enlarge it some more to find what is written on the background and may (will) help resolve the case...

I had the exact same reaction! In fact, I caught myself wondering why they don't just make a "zoom and enhance" button, since they never zoom without enhancing. LOL! :-)

We should maybe do a post that reports all the shows/movies where we can spot Photoshop? (or Bridge)

I have to agree. And I was laughing out loud too! I was able to recognize the blurry image as a pdf417 even before the 'enhancement' (I did a LOT of barcode work a few years ago).

I was hoping they would stop there and do some real deducting, but alas, no, the magic did, indeed, start at that point. Actually, I though the decoding of the barcode data into an itinerary was just as magical as being able to image it to the point it COULD be decoded.

And yes, these labs do seem to have every filter, decoder, codec, transform, and deeply semantic database they could ever need. Not to mention the ability and lack of ethics to allow them to hack into ANY commercial, personal, academic, or governmental database they stumble across.

But all in all the storytelling is the importnat thing and writers and film makers have reliedon Deus ex Machina solutions for centuries...I guess the Machina is JUST a bit more literal these days!

Bill McDaniel

I was laughing at this one too. The problem with it for me, though, is this -- whenever they get into image manipulation it's abundantly clear that they don't know what they're talking about and are inventing nonsense. Which makes me doubt them when they talk about stuff I don't know about.

This fits into my tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory that all these crime shows where there's a new type of crime and a new motive every week are there partially to spread misinformation on how to succeed at pulling off a "perfect" crime.

Zoom in!