The study also found that fans of shows like CSI were just as likely to return a guilty verdict in cases that rely on more traditional evidence like witness testimony. “Our conclusion was that there was no such thing as a ‘CSI Effect,’” said Washtenaw County Circuit Judge Donald Shelton. “We suggested it should be called the ‘tech-effect’ because it simply reflects the knowledge people have of the role of technology in our culture.”

The sampling library, also known as “Edna”, was first shown in the season six premiere of CSI: NY, “Epilogue”. Dr Sheldon Hawkes (Hill Harper) used the machine to identify a piece of tempered glass retrieved from a healed wound on the victim’s shoulder. “What she does is gather information,” Kelsey said of the machine. “There are thirty thousand slides here, and she retracts one of them that’s going to be examined by a technician.”

“A lot of people think this is all computer-run,” Kelsey continued. In reality, the machine is controlled by two human operators. “We’re the people that try to do those things that make people say, ‘How’d they do that?’” he added. “Specifically, anything that the production can’t buy or rent, we will actually make.” That includes the sampling library. “I think the hardest part of my job is getting everything done correctly on time,” he said. “In our business, it only has to work really really well for about a minute or two, but in that minute or two, you have to not fail.”

You can watch the original video below:

The opening shot lasted two-and-a-half minutes and travelled through the autopsy room, the CSI lab and outside to where Nick Stokes (George Eads) and Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) were shooting at the men who broke into the lab to steal a body from the morgue. “That shot alone was definitely the most expensive shot we’ve ever done,” explained co-producer Brad Tanenbaum. “It’s the most technologically advanced shot we have ever done for sure, if not in television. I don’t think you really appreciate it until you see how it was done and how it was broke down.”

“It took six weeks of planning,” he continued. “It took two months worth of digital effects to do it. It took three days of motion control shooting, which is never done. We brought the motion control crane to set. We set up the crane. We used every single one of our cast members, which we never do on my unit. It’s very, very difficult.”

During the early stages, the crew talked with director Kenneth Fink about the route of the shot, what it would look like when it was finished and how to approach each individual shot. After the footage was filmed, it came down to the visual effects department to finish the scene. “This was definitely a unique challenge for the show and for the crew and for my guys to put together, so this was definitely the biggest thing I’ve ever done for the show,” said Visual Effects Supervisor Rik Shorten.

Tanenbaum added that the CSI crew doesn’t get bored despite being on the air for a decade. “What keeps us going is the writing. The writing really challenges us,” he said. “We don’t get bored. They really give us a brand new challenge.”

You can watch the full behind-the-scenes clip below:

(Thanks to Shane from TalkCSI for the heads up.)

Meteorology expert Jesse Ferrell concentrated on the weather aspects of the episode. “I’m not Mythbusters so I don’t want to get into questions like whether the wire would have been able to electrocute the players sufficiently to kill them,” he explained. Instead, he described the “bolt from the blue” phenomenon itself.

Jesse Cardoza (Eddie Cibrian) stated in the episode that lightning can strike from a clear sky and travel 30 miles. “I’m glad that they are promoting the idea that you can be killed far outside of a thunderstorm,” Ferrell said. “‘Bolts From The Blue’ as they are called are a serious problem and I have blogged about situations where people were killed from them both in Miami and on a beach from an offshore thunderstorm like the one depicted in this episode. Depending on who you ask, the number is sometimes lower than 30, rarely higher.”

“I was happy that they mentioned something as geeky as Fulgurites,” he continued, referring to tubes of glass that are formed when lightning strikes sand. “The show insinuated that fulgurites form around wires, when in reality they form in plain sand or dirt as the lightning travels through it – I’m not sure if they would form around a wire or not but the flashback slo-mo animation of the fulgurite is pretty darn cool, I’ve never seen that visualized before but it seems reasonable.”

Speaking of the special effects, Ferrell was moderately pleased with the lightning created for the episode. “It’s nearly impossible to mimick lightning in effects that would satisfy any meteorologist and the depiction was acceptable,” he shared. “What wasn’t acceptable, unfortunately, was the tiny cumulus cloud that the lightning came from. ‘Bolts From the Blue’ would be coming from large, highly developed thunderstorms and in my opinion the small cloud shown couldn’t have produced lightning at all. It shouldn’t have been hard to find a stock photo of a decent thunderstorm.”

The comment that Miami experiences the highest rate of lightning strikes in the country was not entirely accurate, Ferrell revealed. “Florida’s ‘lightning alley’ is considered to run from Tampa to Orlando across the center of the state,” he said. “Overall though, most of Florida experiences the highest rates in the country.”

The lightning would have immediately knocked the volleyball players down, bolts do not always strike the highest point, and the “bolt from the blue” phenomenon is so rare that the conditions necessary to pull off the murder in the episode would require a lightning strike with odds of “probably a million or more to one”. However, that was not the biggest error Ferrell saw in the episode. “The biggest inaccuracy is that the lightning made no sound when it struck,” he said. “Regardless of where the lightning came from, the thunder that you hear is loud when it strikes close because it is striking close. It looked like to me that the lifeguard stand was 100 feet away at best – at this distance the thunder would have been so loud that it would have certainly been heard in the scene, probably causing people to jump in unison or be knocked off their feet.”