Action camera
Also known as: POV camera, helmet camera
A small, rugged, wide angle camera designed to be mounted rather than held, which shapes everything about the footage it produces.
Updated
What it means
An action camera is defined by its constraints rather than its specification. It is small enough to mount anywhere, sealed against water and dust, and has no viewfinder worth using while moving, so it is aimed by guesswork.
Those constraints produce a characteristic kind of footage: very wide, close to the subject, stabilised electronically and shot in enormous quantity because nobody is deciding when to press record.
The format also explains why automatic editing exists. A camera that records whole sessions rather than chosen shots generates hours of POV footage that nobody has the patience to review by hand.
How it works in practice
Mount position does more for the result than any setting. The same camera on a chest, a helmet and a pole produces three completely different shots, and the choice is made before filming rather than after.
Shooting wider than needed is the habit that pays off later, since a wide original leaves room for Fisheye correction and for reframing without running out of pixels.
Batteries and cards are planned in multiples. A session consumes both faster than people expect, and a camera that stopped recording is worse than one that recorded badly.
What to watch out for
The absence of a usable viewfinder means framing errors are discovered afterwards. A mount that shifted a few degrees produces an hour of footage pointed at a shoulder.
Heat is the other recurring problem. Small bodies recording at high resolution shut down when they get warm, which is what Camera overheating describes and why long static recordings fail most often.
Audio is compromised by design. A sealed body with a flush microphone cannot record clean sound at speed, so camera audio is usually a texture rather than a usable track, and Wind noise dominates anything recorded while moving.
How RawClip handles it
The whole product is built around what these cameras produce: hours of very wide, very shaky footage that nobody ever sits down to edit. The analysis expects fisheye framing, electronic stabilisation and camera audio dominated by wind, rather than treating any of those as faults to be penalised.