In the past, I’ve complained about a film and television trope that I call “can you clean that up a little?” It’s the moment in crime dramas and thrillers when, back at the lab, some nerdy technician spouts technical gobbledygook and uses some fancy version of Photoshop to improbably improve the quality of some grainy security footage.
Today Andy pointed out this great montage of these moments, created by this person:
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Beautiful. I forget where I heard it, but I remember one scene where the ubiquitous ‘person standing behind the technician’ kept ordering ‘pixelate… pixelate’, which would produce the exact opposite of what they showed.
After the giant flashing ACCESS DENIED trope, the infinite image enhancement capability is one of my faves.
Red Dwarf parodied this pretty well:
Superlatives are *not* sufficient … I cannot begin to imagine how much time and work it took to find, meld, blend and edit to create those 103 seconds. And the result is exquisite.
I wonder if it will finally be considered to cliche and embarrassing for writers to put freeze and enhance scenes in their movies/tv shows.
I was watching a show (FlashForward? can’t quite remember) a few nights ago, and they at least had the decency to say they had three or four angles on the shot they were enhancing, allowing them to extrapolate…
…”and here’s what the ring he was wearing looked like.”
But where does the meme come from? I thought I saw Bladerunner in there, that’s the oldest I can think of. I think I saw Harrison Ford in a second clip as well.