It seems to me that this season, the cameras in pro football games have much narrower depth of field. That is, subject (usually, the players or coaches) are in focus, but the background, like the crowd or the rest of the field, are blurrier than they used to be. I’ve noticed this effect after touchdowns, or generally between plays.
Has anyone else noticed this? If it’s not just me, I can imagine at least three things that might be causing this: (1) It’s a digital effect, just like portrait mode on modern cell phones, where the computer figures out the foreground and digitally blurs the background; (2) the cameras are allowed to be closer to the players between plays than they used to be; (3) there are new cameras with bigger sensors in order to accommodate 4K or higher broadcasts.
3 seems most likely to me, but it could definitely be 1. There’s a bit of uncanny valley effect for me, but that could be because I’m just not used to narrow depth of field in those kinds of shots.
If the cameras were closer, the depth of field would be greater. Wide angle lenses have a inherent high depth of field.
We have noticed it, too. It’s got to be a deliberate effect. I was considering starting my own thread. I’m not sure it’s only a sports thing. Might get better traction in Cafe Society?
My guess it id s deliberate choice to blur the background, perhaps to cut down on rude things fans could do on TV, or maybe to emphasize the interviewee.
But what it ends up looking like is those fake “miniature” photos, where you take a photo of a real object, like a train, and blur the foreground and background so it looks like you are taking a (poor depth of field) image of a model railroad.
Now I’m not a football fan but I bought a 4K set a year ago and don’t see that Comcast is routinely broadcasting anything in 4K. I thought perhaps they’d use the Summer Olympics as a showcase for it but if they were airing anything from the games in 4K, I didn’t hear about it.
Do any cable companies show things like NFL games in 4K?
They do. It started I believe with the Super Bowl and the Sony A7 series of cameras. I like low depth of field but I agree it looks weird the way they are using it and often it just ends up looking soft.
Whichever network broadcast the Super Bowl last year streamed the 4K broadcast via its website. It was also available on its Roku app, which I watched on until the stream became too unstable. There were a LOT of people accessing it.
This is probably a Cafe Society question, but does anyone know what the typical sensor size was for cameras used in football games? Pretty small, I imagine.
I don’t quite agree with that – I think low depth of field looks great when used well and has a more cinematic quality to it. I know in my industry (weddings) quality took a huge leap up in wedding videography/cinemetography with the the introduction of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II, a dSLR camera with video capabilities, and a 35mm sensor (36mm x 24mm) with lots of low depth-of-field to play with. Having everything in focus looks like shit to me much of the time. I’m a still shooter (used to shoot sports, including NBA, NFL, and MLB for a short spell in 1997 and 1998 before moving away from the US), and I tend to shoot most my human subjects at one or two stops off of maximum aperture, and that’s pretty standard. You want the important stuff in focus; you want the extraneous stuff soft. That’s what you see a lot in cinema, too.
Now, the problem for me is for wide angle shots, I generally do like more depth of field, depending on the situation. What I see – and completely don’t understand – is that in a lot of these goal celebration shots you get the back or side of the player scoring in focus, and all his teammates coming up to him soft or completely out-of-focus. That looks awful. That whole area should be within the depth of field. You want to see the other players celebrating with him sharp. And then there is a good bit of parts of the frame going in and out of focus as the camera operator runs with the subject. It just looks jerky and amateur hour to me vs. say, a cinema shot with a dedicated focus puller who knows who should and shouldn’t be in focus for a given shot.
These sorts of shots looked better with everyone in focus. At least close the lens two stops. Having the cheering crowd in the background that soft is not, really, to me eliminating a distracting element, which is what low-depth-of-field does. They’re an important part of the scene. Sure, if you’ve got rows of empty seats, opening up is justifiable, but at NFL games, there’s plenty of interest.
In telephoto shots you see lots of low depth-of-field, and it works perfectly with sports and action. With wide-angle moving picture jubos (jubilations) in the endzone, I just don’t get it.