Halftrack, I agree on both points. However, if it really was a single shot and not a pano...there is another type of distortion that also seems to be missing, and is even harder to correct...if it can be done at all: Rectilinear distortion (if that can be corrected, I don't know how.) To "correct" it, you could add barrel distortion, but I'm not sure that necessarily corrects rectilinear...and in any case, the picture seems to have neither type of distortion...yet it is quite a wide angle of view. So that almost rules out a single shot wide angle lens in my opinion. That leaves us with either a stitched pano...or single shot pano (which means a film camera).
I agree, there probably is a way to array perhaps 3 or 4 cameras around a point, where there would be very little overlapping distortion to correct for. And again, to take that to the extreme, it's even possible those cameras were shooting full motion video, rather than multi-shot stills. Which also means it could have been an array of 4k cinema cameras...I mean, there is a lot of star power represented in that picture...hundreds of millions, if not billions of box office dollars represented.
So could it be an array of vertically oriented (portrait mode) 1Dc's? Or even higher end cinema cameras? You would have thousands of frames from each one to select the "best" shot. I guess I could be overthinking this, and it would mean an absurd amount of man hours in post. But think about it...even if this particular picture weren't done that way...it is possible to shoot panoramic stills in that way...by arraying several cameras and shooting video with each one at anywhere from 24 to 60 fps.
It's sort of the idea of the circle of motion cameras that would freeze athletes or wildlife like sharks, and then pan around them 360 degrees. Only with a single point array of cameras, you're capturing a panoramic full motion video.
Come to think of it, that's not a bad way to shoot a movie...I just thought of a whole new movie category!! Panoramic movies...let's get to work on one now!
Topic: What camera and lens were used to shoot the 2013 Oscar group portrait? (Read 7873 times)
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... coz 4 (out of the 35) people were hidden behind someone else, 2 guys had their eyes closed, one guy for some reason was looking at an imaginary planet, another guy decided to squat ahead of the front row at the edge of frame (making him look twice as fat as the fattest guy in the group) and while I was trying to get them all to look at the lens and visible to the camera, our Senior most Operations Manger was getting increasingly impatient that I was taking so long to make that photo ... the end result was an embaressing group photo. I much prefer making photos of landscapes, animals, birds or anything else for that matter, even though I am not very good at it. 