What are we supposed to believe this is some sort of magical VCR?

I used to do this when having problems while rendering video in my past life.

image transcription:

Afterwards I found a chatroom thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of theft no one would look at the footage. He said he had tried to explain sorting algorithms to police - he was a computer scientist, after all. You don't watch the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it wasn't there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way through. It's very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of theft. This argument didn't go down well.

This sparked something magical OP.

I was in exactly this situation. My bike was stolen, there was CCTV, they said it would take hours to go through the time during which it was stolen.