The Middle Devonian Marcellus shale that extends from Ohio and West Virginia, northeast into Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York, is believed to hold in excess of a thousand trillion ft of natural gas. High-quality surface seismic data and top-of-the-line processing are essential to characterize these reservoirs and the overburden formations for safe and cost-effective drilling. A workflow comprising data acquisition and processing to prestack seismic inversion and lithofacies classification for characterizing the shale reservoirs is presented. The key elements in this workflow are dense point-receiver data acquisition and processing in the point-receiver domain. A small data set acquired with a proprietary point-receiver system was available to demonstrate the benefits of this methodology. The data were in an area in New York, where the Marcellus formation is known to exist.