Zoom in =  better picture quality?

gumonstro

gumonstro

Well-known member
I was watching "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and got REALLY impressed with the cinematography. The colors, the lighting, the texture of the image are marvelous. I´ve never seen something like that. I went to imdb.com to search who did the job (well, michel gondry maybe did a lot of choices too...) and, again, i read about Ellen Kuras, the DP of "Personal Velocity", which is great too. There was I link to an interview about the process of making "Personal Velocity" (shot with a PD150). Here´s what she said:

About filming 'Personal Velocity': 'From the start, I had to set up some parameters about shooting, given my prior lessons on 'Bamboozled', which was a great first learning experience on Mini-DV. I didn't want to shoot very many wide shots. If we were going to shoot wide shots, we would have to move the camera far away and shoot on the longer part of the lens. This is because the lines on Mini-DV cameras resolve much better when shooting with the longer part of the lens that is slightly zoomed in.

Anyone knows what she´s talkin´ about ????

Hey, and if you have any information on "Eternal Sunshine..." cinematography, tell me.
 
Re: Zoom in =  better picture quality?

She is partially correct. Due to the compresion of the mini dv format, wide shots usually dont retain much detail. I particularly love to use wide shots for composition reasons, but with shots that have a lot of stuff going on, most if it isn't as sharp as desired. However if you use a wide shot close-up then the detail will be seen a lot better. For the most part extreme wide shots aren't as crisp, but that doesn't mean that it will comprimise the quality of the composition.
 
Re: Zoom in =  better picture quality?

I'm not really sure what she means about the "lines resolves better". Closeups always looks better than wide shots with minidv, but it sounds like she is not refering to closeups vs wide shots.

Another point in using the longer end of the zoom lens is that you will get a shallower depth of field, which looks more like film, but again, I don't think this is what she is talking about here.
 
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