tv pet peeve #5697...

[ratcreature]

The latest incident of this I've noticed was in this week's CSI: New York, but it's not really specific to that ep, so I don't think it needs a spoiler cut. So once again they examine photos taken by bystanders on their cell phones for evidence, and this is related to that weird "endless zoom and image enhancement" phenomenon in procedurals (and wow, do I wish photos and video really worked like that, that you somehow could extract all potential information rather than all actual information recorded, because then if you had a reference picture of an object and needed to see the detail of some part of the mechanism rather than the whole thing you could just zoom instead of cursing about how few easy to find photos there are just showing a small part of a thing in great detail), but I don't mean that exactly, though it is also a pet peeve of mine. It's that on top of the endless detail it never seems to happen that a significant portion of their relevant photos just suck too much, like maybe blurry because the person wobbled too much, completely over or under exposed, etc. This somehow annoys me because random tv people are apparently much better at taking snapshots than actual people, even if they are just using cell phones, are in a crowd, and not all sober.

Also, I suspect that it isn't remotely realistic that they'd get a complete 3-D room view to zoom through even if all the people took photos a lot, because at an event with stuff happening on a stage and a crowd taking photos, almost everybody taking photos will take photos of the stuff happening on the stage, so there ought to be "blank spots" in their reconstruction in the other areas even if they extrapolate, unless the stage was in the middle of the room and people standing in 360° around it, like for a boxing ring, but that wasn't the case here, iirc, but the stage was set up at one end.

Comments

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

We make fun of this on NCIS all the time. :D As someone who does graphic design for a living, I wish I had a magic photo enhancement program that could correct for shaky-blur and zoom in on two pixels of the original image to reconstruct a person's face!

[ratcreature]

Yeah, it would be awesome. I can't count the number of times I had a photo of something I wanted to draw but couldn't make out a detail, even in a large relatively hi-res picture, because understandably someone had, for example photographed the whole armor rather than just its buckle or whatever I want to see.

[astridv.livejournal.com]

"endless zoom and image enhancement" phenomenon in procedurals

That peeves me SO MUCH. Bones and NCIS do it, too. One can only assume that none of the writers/producers of these things ever tried to enlarge an image themselves.

[ratcreature]

I find it really incomprehensible that it is so ubiquitous. It shouldn't be so hard to understand that you can't extract information that was never captured in the first place, and that educated enhancement guesses you can make are limited. It's as if they think cameras somehow magically make a copy of reality, like the wizarding world photos in HP, rather than record light reflected of things as they appear with a certain resolution, and you just have to somehow tease out this reality copy by mysterious computer tools.

[feanna.livejournal.com]

CSI-NY has actually won a Sci-Fi price (I have no idea which excactly) for all the technology they use. I think it just gets worse each season, this season I especially noticed the instant 3D imaging in autopsy.

[ratcreature]

I wouldn't even mind SF technology if they bothered to make it hard, near-future SF, and only did stuff that was possible in principle, but unless their cameras suddenly work like magic and make copies of all potentially available information, rather than actual recordings of reflected light, that's not even SF. Fancy computers or not, you just can't enhance some black blob into a person or whatever, just because in reality somewhere stood there. But then I probably shouldn't expect too much from a show that had someone shocked with a defibrillator by paramedics not with paddles on skin, but by putting them on the *clothes* last week. Very much WTF?!

[feanna.livejournal.com]

I hear you about the pictures. NCIS actually had Abby unable to get a clear image in the episode before this one, but I don't know how much reality was involved.

Defibrilation is a WHOLE new topic. It doens't help at all once the heart has stopped. It can help restart a normal rhythm when the electrical currents are in disorder. I don't remember whether shocking was at all plausible in that ep, but yeah doing it through clothes is just ...

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I've kind of resigned myself to the flatline defibrillation even though I know that is wrong and I don't think people usually jerk around that dramatically either, but not removing the clothes is a whole new level of moronic. I mean, I could have overlooked them not wiping off sweat, even though the guy was exited and throwing a basketball hoop before he collapsed and there's supposed to be contact with dry skin, what with salt water sweat just conducting the current outside otherwise, but holding paddles against a t-shirt is just... gah.