Ever realize why the videos you shot with your sonys or cellphones does not look even close to what you see on screen, say your favorite tv-show, like house?

Hollywood movies, or higher budgeted production uses a 35-mm video camera, whereas your standard video’s sensor size (film size) is about the size of your fingertips. So why such a huge difference?

The larger the size of the sensor (film) the bigger the depth-of-field (put your finger a couple of inches between your eyes, and try focusing to your finger tips) the blurred area behind your finger is what’s called the circle of confusion resulted from your focused subject closer to your eye. This phenomenon, has an appropriately coined japanese term “bokeh” that simply means that blurry effect produced by lenses.

Recently we see the rise of HD quality video capturing from a digital SLR (Canon 5D Mark II, Nikon D700 and a few others lead the way), given such feature, paired with dSLR’s extensive lens collection, we can produce Hollywood looking movies from our own backyard.

Here’s a fine example by one Philip Bloom. Shot in available light with a Canon 5D Mark II paired with a Zeiss 50mm f/1.4 lens over a couple of nights, the following is what came out straight from the camera. All shot was captured handheld using the Z-Finder from Zacuto to give the camera a proper video friendly viewfinder and stability.

[vimeo width=”640″ height=”360″]http://vimeo.com/4704533[/vimeo]

Head over to Philip’s Blog for behind the scene shot & full HD video download.