Quote - If you can somehow get it where the shadow is sharp near where the ball touches the floor, then blurs more with distance, you'd have a very convincing area light fake.

This is the major advantage of raytraced shadows with blur vs. depth mapped shadows (where the whole shadow is uniformly blurry).  The reason the ball's looks the way you notice is that he's rendering with a purely raytraced shadow, and no form of ambient occlusion or GI.

My Freebies