Fancy Camera Work

I've been noticing something lately.

Camera stabilization software has been getting much better. Better to the point where consumer-level software (like iMovie) has pretty good stabilization software built-in.

Meanwhile, in video games, there seems to be progressively less stabilization. In action games, at least. Whenever there's anything exciting happening on the screen, lately, it seems like it's the game developer's duty to make the camera move around as if there was a (mostly) invincible person holding the camera and running around the action. But the only reason that would be is for a movie, documentary, or newscast, and in all those cases there's almost guaranteed to be some fancy software that could stabilize the image.

It's happening more and more in movies, too, especially during CG scenes. WALL-E is a good example. When the ship is coming back to pick up EVE and WALL-E is racing his way back to her the 'camera' is bouncing around, zooming in and out, dodging around obstacles that a virtual camera could easily just go right through. I mean, it works for the most part, it does make it look like it's actually someone chasing this little robot with a camera, until you think about it and realize it's just some fancy programming.

Still, it's kind of neat to see a certain type of software developing and become widespread while another software that does the exact opposite is also being developed and implemented by just as many people.