enjoyed it but what about the "artifacts"

Rating: 8/10 (3 June 2006)

I took the kids to see this and we all really enjoyed it. Just enough asides to keep the adults laughing and the kids enjoyed all the adventure.
What really surprised me were all of the compression artifacts I kept seeing where there should have been smooth gradation in the backgrounds, for instance. I mean this is DreamWorks, right?
Quite often areas of out of focus leaves and/or sky behind the characters would have "banding" where it should just gradually blended from one color to another.
Verne also (in his close-ups especially) had a checkerboard like pattern in the dither they used to show modeling on his face, especially the "chin" area.
I'm used to seeing highly compressed images online I'm even used to this through my HD Tuner for some of the more compressed "extra" channels. . .
I was really surprised by this. Were they in that big of a hurry to get this released?
Or was I the only one who noticed this?
MR