Constant Cinema

I spent various parts of the day writing a blog entry about the big win for DSLR cinematography in the form of last night's episode of "House." Unfortunately, the deep ambivalence I feel for these cameras kept creeping through and destroying any coherency in the article. So instead of rambling through a long post, here's the takeaway:

• The bar has officially been lowered in cinematography
• That lowered bar is pretty good, but please people, aim higher
• Overall the episode looked pretty good
• Filmmakers spent 85% of the episode at reasonable DoF
• The last 5 minutes looked ridiculous with the shallow focus
• The bokeh sometimes looked like crap, especially during rack focus; the lenses they used were decent so I wonder if it has anything to do with image sampling.
• Digital noise was more pleasant than I expected but not great
• Small form factor of the cameras was good for the cramped location, but I don't know why they didn't opt for an A-minima or Ikonoskop, or Hell, even a prototype Epic (sure Jim would have been all over that) which would have looked better.
• Kudos on the awesome use of primary colors in the art direction
• Story was good, I wasn't distracted from it until the end
• Overall, I grade it a B-

And there you go.