I shoot 8K raw, and this is what it costs

I shoot almost everything in 8K raw. The files are enormous. I do it anyway, and here's the trade I'm making.

What you get

Freedom, mostly. Shooting 8K raw means I can crop into a frame and still deliver, which turns one shot into several. It means the grade starts from everything the sensor saw rather than from a decision I made in a hurry in the field.

For wildlife that's the difference between a usable frame and a missed one. You can't ask an animal to move closer, but you can crop.

What it costs

Storage, and it isn't a small line item. I run blades across two stations, plus the big drive, and I still run out.

The blades go in the field and come home full. They slot into a station on the desk rather than being copied over a cable, which is the part that saves real time. Two stations, four blades each, and the big drive next to them.

The thing people get wrong

You need solid state to work from. Not to archive, to work from.

Editing and grading 8K raw off a spinning disk is slow enough to get in the way. You need the speed to process from, which in practice means the footage you're actually working on lives on solid state. Spinning disks are for bulk and for the copies you're keeping, not for the timeline you're cutting.

Label everything, immediately

Every blade gets a label and it goes on before the blade goes anywhere. Years with a sequence number for the ordinary run of work, 2025, 2025-2, 2026-2, 2026-4, and the name of the place when a trip is its own thing. Sumatra. DR, for the Dominican Republic. Clients gets its own blade.

One of mine reads 2025-3/2026-1, because the work on it didn't care that a year ended in the middle of it.

This is the least interesting part of the setup and the part that saves me most often. A drawer of identical grey rectangles with no writing on them isn't a backup, it's a search problem.

How it is actually arranged

Fast and small in the pack, so the working files travel. Cheap bulk for the copies that just need to exist. A large drive at home where everything lands.

That's three tiers doing three different jobs, and the mistake is thinking one drive can do all of them.

And then you grade it

The grade starts from RED Log3G10, everything the sensor saw. I don't start it from scratch.

I built LUTs for the V-Raptor that do the conversion and the look in one file, measured against a chart, so the 8K raw gets to a finished picture in one step.