C'mon,. guys, get real!

[ffutures]

CSI have just used the most ridiculous "find the vital clue" McGuffin ever... I know that what they're describing (without giving the plot away, it's finding a sound recording in an unlikely medium) is technically possible, and really has been done, but they didn't make any attempt to make it look plausible. You don't scan 1% of the possible recording area and instantly find exactly what you want, it's an incredibly difficult technical process that takes hundreds of hours. Yes, I know it's a 45 minute show, but this was just silly...

Comments

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

The thing that bugs me is that they could have done one of their sequences to show that a process is complicated and takes a while, which they usually do pretty well, e.g. when they show the face of a corpse being reconstructed by a sculptor sticking clay to the skull. Instead we got them sticking the object in question onto a turntable, shining a laser at it, turning a few dials, and instantly extracting a sound recording. It was insultingly over-simplified.

[dsample.livejournal.com]

Even when they show something like that, they compress the time. A facial reconstruction like that takes days or weeks to complete, not a couple of hours.

And then there's the way they run DNA profiles at the drop of a hat. Typical lab turn around time for doing a DNA profile is two or three weeks. If they rush it, it can be done in three days.