Berm
Also known as: banked corner, banked turn
A banked corner on a trail or track, built so a rider can hold speed through it, and one of the most reliably filmable features there is.
Updated
What it means
A berm is a corner with the turn built into the ground. The bank lets a rider lean into it and carry speed, which produces a body position that reads clearly from almost any angle.
For a filmer it is the opposite of a jump. A berm is predictable, repeatable and happens in one place, which makes it the easiest thing on a trail to set a camera up for.
It is a feature rather than a discipline, and it appears across several. Mountain bike trails, Downhill tracks, pump tracks and motocross circuits all use the same shape for the same reason.
How it works in practice
The inside of the corner is the obvious position and rarely the best one. Low and on the outside, looking across the bank, shows the lean angle that the inside view flattens.
A Low-angle shot at the exit is the shot people remember. A camera on the ground where the rider is leaned over and accelerating out produces scale that nothing else on the trail does.
It is where a second camera earns itself. A fixed body at the berm and a worn camera on the rider covers one corner from both sides, and both will be usable.
What to watch out for
Everybody films the same angle. The outside-of-the-corner shot is correct and extremely common, so one session of berms produces footage that looks like every other session of berms.
Dirt reaches the lens immediately. A camera low at the exit of a corner gets everything the rear wheel throws, and a Lens protector plus a wipe between runs is the difference.
Repetition is invisible while filming. Six laps through one berm is six nearly identical clips, and Duplicate shot detection discards five of them, which is the right answer and wasted effort.
How RawClip handles it
Corner shots score well, because the lean and the speed are both unambiguous motion in the frame. Repeated laps through the same berm are collapsed to the best one, so filming four laps rather than ten changes nothing about the result.