We’ve all seen movies where the main star creates a computer virus by aligning three dimensional cubes on a 10 monitor display in order to create a super virus to destroy the bad guys’ computers. Hollywood believe computers are magic and I found a good list of Hollywood’s favorite computer sorcery. My pet peeve is on there:
3. You can zoom and enhance any footage
This has long been the staple of the lazy writer (particularly those working for CSI): a security camera or photo is put on a screen, someone asks for zone G4 to be zoomed and enhanced, then as if by magic stunning detail appears from nowhere and the criminal is identified.
For this system to work it either requires every camera and CCTV system to use Gigapixel resolutions, or such incredible computing technology that Hollywood could throw away all of its expensive HD cameras and shoot everything using £50 camcorders.
As we all know, all zooming into a poor-quality image would do is give a muddled blurry mess on the screen. This technique was recently brilliantly parried in Red Dwarf.