Mar 24 2009
Movie Cliches People Believe Are Real, Part 1
We have all seen a great deal of movies. In fact, I believe it’s pretty safe to say, we all love movies… at least those of you who read this page. After all, it’s a post site about “Films.” We have all seen those films that use these little tactics to move plot forward easily and cutting down the time used in real life to progress the pacing of the story. I refer of course to those little movie cliches we all take for granted… but they piss me right the fuck off.
This time on “Movie Cliches People Believe are Real” we’re going to talk about technology. Well, a slight look into technology cliches, not all of them.
“Clean Up That Image.”
One of the most horrendous offenders of this is the “Clean up that image” cliche. You know the one… The detective is strung out and finds a stop light photo of the suspect on the sidewalk - way in the back ground - but it’s all blurry. He zooms in on his Neo-Matrix-Photoshop computer and asks the technician behind the controls to “clean up the image…. it’s blurry.” No shit, it’s blurry. It was taken from150 feet away with a shitty camera. And yes, I know the new cameras they have up are pro enough to see the insurance sticker on your license plates but this isn’t what we are talking about.
When said Detective gets the image print out he wanted the photo is as clean as if it was taken from 10 feet away, in clear day light. We are able to make out the fine details to the point that we can see how to wash the perp’s shirt in cold water to avoid color bleed.
Let’s take a look at how blowing up an image works:
Here we have a street corner with people walking around. It would seem that our perp is just in sight. I get to the crime lab and tell my trusty co-worker Rickshaw to “Zoom in and clean it up.”
Rickshaw - “Here you go sir.”
Detective - “Oh thank you, Rickshaw.”
Detective - “Hm, yes, good start, now let’s push in more.”
Rickshaw - “Sir, we have a blown up image, what do you think?”
Detective - “I think we can push in more.”
Detective - “ok, stop fucking with me here… Push in more, Rickshaw, more.”
Rickshaw - “Yes sir… but you do understand anything more than this we won’t be able to…”
Detective - “Damnit Rickshaw, a woman’s life is on the line!”
Detective (who is now starting to feel like Will Smith, so we change his name to Will Smith) Will Smith - “There we go, we’re on the right path…”
Rickshaw - “er…..”
Will Smith - “More!”
Will Smith - “We’re so close to finding him out, I can taste it.”
Rickshaw - “You can taste pixalation?”
Will Smith - “We’re almost there, Rickshaw. Hit it again.”
Rickshaw - “Ok, this isn’t helping at all…”
Will Smith - “So damn close…. One more… “
Will Smith - “Aw, hell no!”
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Join us next time for more Movie Cliches People Think Are Real.
What if the image has super high resolution?… then you would be able to zoom in quite alot and still get a clear picture… then the “clean up that image” line just means the processing time….bitch.
However, most of the time in these films the source is not a SLR-type camera. They are cellphones with photo capabilities or street cameras used to see accidents or like the photo we showed above, some random photo from some random source… and most people do not have that good of high res cameras even though they think they do.
So yes, in argument, if one were to take a solid image with a high rez camera, one could zoom in and “clean it up” so to speak. However, with that clean of an image one would use a tripod, correct iris and F-stop settings and so forth, thus negating it could come from a random snap shot, street security or cell phone image.
And yes, we can blow it up as big as you want, but something that isn’t vector based will come out like the 2nd to last image, completely pixelated.
Good day.
I said good day!