Micah On Location News   •   March 3, 2019

I recently shot a series of portraits for a film department featuring faculty and staff.  I was tempted to do the normal using a dslr and shoot it against a normal photo backdrop but I really don’t like to do the normal boring  stuff that people usually end up doing.  I like to stretch myself in everything I do so that I am forced to learn something new.  I ran across an article by Vincent LaForet on the fstoppers.com who has adopted using the RED cameras to perform portraits.  This inspired me to take a risk and shoot the portraits with the RED HELIUM 8k cameras.

For each portrait I decided to create imagery that told a story of each person of what they really enjoyed in life. With this and the challenge that was ahead of me I was able to get Beck Bulebush to assist with camera.  We both set out lighting a different scene for each person.  I tested out the stills mode on the camera with and had great success but I wanted to film video as well for promotional material.  I chose to film at 23.976 fps and used a higher shutter speed so I would have less motion blur if there was movement in the shot.  The camera was set for 8k full frame, 5:1 compression, 23.976 fps and shutter at 1/96.

After filming I wanted each person to pick the exact frame for their portraits so I transcoded the 8k footage to 1080p and uploaded it to Kollaborate for review.  I created links to each video and sent them off.  Several weeks later and many emails to persuade them to pick the frame they wanted, I was able to get it.  They all submitted a timecode specific marker to Kollaborate.

After that I opened up the RAW r3d footage in REDCineX and copied the timecode of the first frame and pasted it into Kollaborate.  To give a little perspective Kollaborate allows you to adjust the timecode for any of the videos to the start timecode of choice.  This was extremely helpful in that I will know the exact timecode for the selected frame that had a marker on it.  With this I copied the timecode and went back to REDCineX and pasted it on the clip which moved the playhead to the selected frame.  I then adjusted the output color to low contrast and very soft for highlights.  I then exported a tiff image of the frame which the client wanted.

I used Skylum’s Luminar 3 to grade the final image.  I have grown to love Luminar as I have been grading my image in there for several months now.

The BIG takeaway from this project is that you need to be prepared for the amount of hard drive space required to film at 8k resolutions.  This would potentially include backups so that you don’t loose the data.  If you can afford to have the camera rental and storage space I would highly recommend filming portraits this way.  That is the process for my portraits. I hope you enjoyed it and found it informational.