OK Fred Meyers worked for Lucasfilm so you would expect him to peddle the line of digital being better than film....but this guy knows what he is talking about!
Hi-def video’s extreme depth of field led the filmmakers to alter their blocking methods, as well as their approach to focusing on multiple actors in a shot. "We knew going in that our cameras had a greater depth of field, 2 to 2 1/2 times greater than 35mm film," Meyers says. "We shot much of the principal material around T2 or T2.8, and that looked flat from your fingertips to infinity. But there are certain focus pulls in three-shots or two-shots that viewers have come to expect aesthetically, particularly in anamorphic shows. So even though you can have a two-shot or an over-the-shoulder in HD where you can hold both actors in focus, we sometimes found ourselves cheating focus on the set to sell the scenes the way audiences might expect them to traditionally play. Whereas the approach to that would be clear and simple with film – go for the person who’s talking, go for the eyes, that sort of thing – we fought a little bit more about how to deal with those splits."
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Meyers dismisses the notion that Episode II looks better digitally projected than it does on film simply because it originated digitally. "I have some concerns about those comments, especially when you consider that so much of Episode I was digital to start with," he says. "Even though it originated mostly on film, Episode I has plenty of digital matte paintings and digital characters. When we did our digital-acquisition tests, we did side-by-side [comparisons] with anamorphic, Super 35, VistaVision and digital and took them all out to film. Shooting digitally, we got a good-looking picture that in many cases was better than many of the film formats. The decision to shoot digitally had nothing to do with digital exhibition, other than that we could be digital from start to finish.