Cinematography improvements

I wanted to watch something with decent sound tonight as something easy before I hit the road tomorrow (daytrip), it ended up being Conan the Barbarian. One thing that struck me midway through was the cinematography ... Things seem to have improved rather since Conan was made in terms of keeping the focus consistent across the frame of what's on screen.

In Conan, the sharp focus is very definitely restricted to what the director and camera is most interested in showing. The rest of the scene tends to diminish into somewhat of a blur. More modern films don't really seem to suffer from this, the image is sharp all the way across the scene. Here's an example :

(copyright 2002 Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment Ltd)

This is the one that set me off - Conan is sharp, Princess in the background is rather fuzzy. Compare that to :

(copyright 2005 Lucasarts Ltd)

This is actually one of the few images up to halfway in Revenge of the Sith where the animators at Lucasarts didn't finish the job. This is a nearfield object dominated shot, yet the robots in the medium field are a little blurry with the far background sharp.

Maybe it's a symptom of Green Screening becoming more common ? The image we see on the dvd or blu-ray is not actually what's being caught by the camera ? CGI doesn't suffer from the limitations of the conventional optical camera lens, with things like focal lengths and chemical based film. However, the animators do try to build in imperfections like lens flare and bloom to make the image look more real. The cameras will be catching the actors, with the visual effects people placing those actors in a visually perfect backdrop.

(copyright 2005 Lucasarts Ltd)

Looks like the camera limits are still there when they're taking shots of actors against a background far away, here's a shot of Angelina Jolie after having far too much with guns in the first Tomb Raider film :

(copyright 2001 Paramount Pictures Corp)

Hey ! I needed a relatively modern film that might have some real backgrounds in it ! Sexy lead actress has nothing to do with it. Oh - back to the point, sharp actress in foreground, blurry walls in the background. The animators try to replicate this in the CGI pictures and it's rampant throughout Revenge of the Sith. Apart from the in space shots, where you can see close ups of Obi-wan in his fighter with as sharp a picture of a cruiser behind him as dvd can produce. Perhaps one of the reasons people criticised Final Fantasy was that it got things too "perfect", maybe we need a little blurriness to keep our eyes and brain happy with what we're seeing.

Here's another where the Lucasarts people got it a little too good :

(copyright 2005 Lucasarts Ltd)

Yoda's got the focus in the foreground, yet it's easy to make out those details in the far field. One last picture, again from Revenge of the Sith, this shows the animators compensating for that nearfield/far field blurriness :

(copyright 2005 Lucasarts Ltd)

I'm supposed to be on the road in 7 hours and have to get some sleep before then, will try to "acquire" (aka screen grab from dvds!) some piccys to show what I mean when I get home tomorrow. Screen grabs done :-)

PS I reckon the screens at the local Mall are worn out ... The picture seems far less fuzzy when I watch films like Transformers and the Bournes than I remember it being on the big screen.