Crafting the shot

Practical, field-tested techniques and gear for capturing interviews, b-roll, and authentic moments.

In the late 1950s, IBM programmer George Fuechsel coined the phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. The idea was that the quality of what you put into a system determines the quality of what comes out. The same principle applies to filmmaking, where image capture matters.

At Copper Hound, we film on RED cinema cameras, with our primary camera having the ability to capture in 8K resolution. While most final videos are delivered in 4K (and often viewed on smaller screens), shooting in 8K gives us tremendous flexibility in post-production. It allows us to push in, reframe, or create multiple compositions from a single shot, all without ever losing image quality. In practical terms, one 8K interview frame can yield a wide shot, a medium shot, and a close-up, all at full 4K resolution. That level of flexibility simply isn’t possible if the original footage is captured in 4K.