A first step toward 6x17 digital...

[jbeale]

couldn't they make a rig whereby the cameras shoot side by side and are "locked" together or "stitched" together to make a gigantic panoramic sort of picture?

I have seen rigs of this sort, using 4 or more MiniDV cameras on one platform pointed at different angles and later joined together into an ultrawide panorama. I don't think the cameras were exactly synchronized, but for some purposes apparently it doesn't matter.

No reason you couldn't do it with RED, except there might be parallax problems with the immediate foreground because you can't put the imagers exactly side-by-side due to the width of the camera body + lens.

 

[Kevin Wild]

That's a good point. I guess they would be a solid 10 inches or so apart which would cause issues.

 

[C L Walker]

This Is Cinerama, anyone?

This Is Cinerama, anyone?

Anyone can take panoramic pictures these days, with one camera and a stitching application... and three camera cinema is as old as Abel Gance's Napoleon. So yes, multicam panoramics have been done already. What is unique about a wide sensor like the proposed Red 617 will be fast shutter speeds with digital capture and a true single POV instead of a cheat like Cinerama (google it!) was.

But yes, wide formats are amazing and intriguing once you start shooting them. Look at Henri Lartigue's work he did with a Nettel camera at the beginning of the last century. The camera he used for wide images was a convertible model that sometimes had twin lenses to take stereopair images, or it could be configured to use one lens in the center to take wide shots.

One would think that this Seitz camera could also be configured to shoot stereo images, too although that's hardly playing to the strengths of the gizmo. Actually, the darn thing doesn't have many strengths, really. The capture time is so slow that an array of stitched images would seem to achieve a similar result...