I'm not into film or moviemaking, but I found everything you talked about to be incredibly well illustrated and explained in a way i could comprehend. It genuinetly sparked interest and i was delighted by how many movie-clips you were able to present for each topic you discussed. Really cool!
An amazing use of the probe lens is in Oldboy where we go from an extreme close up of Choi Min-Sik, pull back through the gap of a pair of chopsticks, make pass a dumpling and turn into a medium shot
As long as the shot, angle & scene guides the story to where the filmmaker wants it to be, any effort could win. One could abide by Sergei Eisenstein's theories or they could use compositional thinking & framing like the late still-photographer Garry Winogrand, & finally, they could possibly invent something on their own. The filmmaking options are ongoing once the crew & cast starts rolling. Enjoy your Sunday & new week. Continue the good content!
I would say when you can easily hide the blurry zone. If you want the scene to have a lot of tension or trying to convey a sense of confrontation like in the Mission Impossible scene. That scene conveyed a sense of he's right just above the guy's head. In a scene that you want to include the location as part of getting the feeling of the scene across, you'd choose wide aperture over a diopter. If you're choosing to use a wide angle lens, it doesn't make sense to use a diopter. The diopter is useful for overcoming the natural shallow depth of field of tight close ups.
To sum it up, true deep focus means shooting the lens at a very tight, closed aperture which means you have to feed a lot more light into the camera to achieve standard levels of exposure. Split diopters give you some of that deep focus effect while still letting you use more standard T-stops, but as the video stated, they're still going to have some form of marking that indicate where the diopter is creating the split. There are ways to mask it practically, but they're not easy and no matter what, the effect is inherently jarring since it's a visual perspective the human eye can't naturally produce. It also inherently locks the key subjects to their distance and their side of the screen since it means they'll either move through the distortion mark or leave the zone of focus that's being created by the diopter's magnification so camera movement or blocking the actors is a big no-no with a split diopter.
I was wondering the same thing as I was watching the video, but I eventually understood it as this: with an authentic deep depth of field, where you're using a high f stop (high focal length), EVERYTHING at all distances will be in focus. But with split diopter, you can achieve an effect where the foreground and background objects are in focus, but the middle ground is out of focus. Almost like there are two short focal lengths for two objects at different distances.
I hate DePalma’s split diopter shots. I know I’m in the minority but they’re just… off putting to say the least. The shot in Blow Out with the owl on the right side of frame and Travolta in the distance on the left - that could have just been a split screen effect: same result.
Grammar Police while both "disorient" and "disorientate" are correct, "disorientate" is more commonly used in British English, whereas "disorient" is preferred in American English.
