The season finale of House aired about two weeks ago but I only caught it last night in HD on iTunes. I was keen to watch this one because it was shot on the Canon 5D SLR using photographic lenses, the first time anything like this has been done for a major TV show.

I’m a big fan of shooting HD with these Canons, I use a 7D after changing over from a Sony HDV. There’re compromises, pros and cons between the two. However the convenience, ease and quality of output from Canon’s HD SLRs wins it for me.

So I settled down to watch House and see what a pro crew could get out of the 5D. I gave up after a few minutes. I’ve never watched House before and the story totally absorbed me. I just forgot about the camera aspect of it, it didn’t matter. Straight away that’s a good thing. Camera heads can discuss the colours and pixels and artifacts, but the story stood head and shoulders above all of this.

In particular, the portability of 5D heightened the claustrophobic feel of some scenes, such as below:

The main reason the director and his D.O.P. chose to shoot on an SLR was to get some very shallow depth of fields that are easily achievable with these cameras. Take a look at the first picture of Dr. House above, and this one here (higher quality images are below along with the first 2 minutes of the episiode):

Now that is a shallow depth of field. For me though, it’s a bit too much and I’m a fan of shallow depth of fields. The front of his face is in focus while his ears are blurred. The human eye doesn’t see things like that. If you were to stand in front Hugh Laurie, the same distance from him as the camera, your eyes would see all of his head as in focus.

The D.O.P. used 1.0 and 1.2 lenses to achieve that look. For me, 2.8 nicely represents the shallow depth of field the human eye sees, but it’s all a creative choice. Philip Bloom has more on the background of the shoot and an interview with the director here.

Overall, things are changing fast camera wise. There’s a real democratising happening of how things are shoot. As I type this, Steve Jobs of Apple is announcing the new iPhone that shoots 720p HD. While there’s nothing new about a phone that can do that, the movie edit program iMovie is now available on the iPhone, meaning you can shoot, edit, add music, transitions and titles to your film, right on your phone.

But all of these doesn’t matter if there isn’t a brilliant, well written, directed and acted story to tell, such as with the House finale. It’s a great episode, do check it out.