It is widely accepted that the emerging concept of immersive media is one of the key technologies for future entertainment. One feature of immersive media is to use large panoramic screens with ultrahigh resolution. This technology requires a completely new production grammar that is not necessarily compatible with conventional production formats. Against this background the paper describes a new approach called format-agnostic production that bridges the gap between different target formats and applications. It does not use fixed numbers of frames, lines and pixels, or even geometry. The philosophy is to merge video signals from different camera sensors with different spatio-temporal resolutions and dynamic ranges to a wide-angle panoramic view of the scene. Hence, to support a wide range of applications from mobile devices to immersive media, any desired shot framing and resolution can be obtained by scanning, panning, or zooming. Apart from a general description of the concept and the system architecture, the paper will mainly focus on technical details of ultrahigh-resolution panoramic imaging which plays a central role in the concept of format-agnostic production.

This paper describes an approach for creating high-resolution video panoramas of large-scale sport events. In an exemplary football scenario, we used two ARRIFLEX D-20 "film-style" digital cameras to capture both sides of the playing field as well as large parts of the stands. From the recorded left and right view images, we created a joint panoramic view with a resolution of 501 6x1400 pel (5k) using sophisticated image processing algorithms. These highly immersive football panoramas were screened with our modular, high-resolution multiprojection system during the FIFA World Cup 2006 in a 600 seat CinemaxX movie theater in Berlin providing the viewers with the feeling of actually watching the game from a good seat on the stands.