The Joy Of Filming Wildlife In 8K

I’ve been filming more video as of late, as you might have noticed, you faithful reader, you.

And I’ve put together a quick video (less than 2 minutes) to show it can help to film in 8K and zoom sometimes up to 4x and get great results.


Last year I purchased the Canon R5, which does 8K video. What is 8K and should you care?

  1. It’s 4x the size of 4K video, which already looks dang good on most screens.
  2. Nope, not really.

For viewers, we don’t care what the footage was filmed. Heck, film itself, the real reel-to-reel stuff, looks just fine in theaters. So….more pixels? Do they really help?

Yes!

In my specific case, I have been playing with 8K because it is 4x the size of 4K. Meaning you can crop out a 1/4 of the screen and what you have is a 4K video. That’s a lot of real estate.

While it is good for stock footage, it’s even better when I want to play around with footage where I am limited in how close I can get. For instance, with birds or other wildlife. I use a RF 100-500mm L lens and that is quite the zoom but it’s not always enough.

At a basic level, 8K footage can be zoomed 2x and still look the same as 4K, because it is. And that’s a lot of advantage when birds are small on the screen.