Clipping
Also known as: digital clipping, overload distortion
Distortion that happens when a signal exceeds what the recording can hold, flattening the loudest peaks into something that cannot be repaired.
Updated
What it means
Clipping is what happens at the ceiling. A waveform that wants to go higher than the format allows is cut flat at the top, and the shape of the sound is lost rather than merely squashed.
The damage is permanent in a way most audio problems are not. Noise can be reduced and levels can be raised, but a flattened peak contains no information about what it used to be.
On action footage it happens constantly and often unnoticed. Wind, engines and impacts all produce sudden loud transients that overrun a level set for ordinary speech, and Audio clipping is the result.
How it works in practice
The defence is headroom during recording rather than repair afterwards. Setting levels so the loudest expected sound sits several decibels below the ceiling leaves room for a surprise.
Peaks are what to watch, not averages. A track averaging comfortably can still clip on every landing, which is why meters show Audio peak values rather than mean level.
Where a camera offers no manual control, the physical fix is the only one available. A Windscreen (dead cat) or a microphone out of the airflow reduces the input before it ever reaches the converter.
What to watch out for
Declipping tools produce a plausible guess rather than a recovery. They interpolate the missing shape, which sounds better than the flat version and is still invented.
Clipped wind is the common case and the least recoverable. The signal was mostly noise before it overran, so there is nothing underneath worth rescuing once it does.
Reducing level afterwards does not undo it either. Turning down a clipped track makes quieter distortion rather than clean audio, which surprises people the first time they try it. The only real remedy is Normalization applied to a track that never overran in the first place.
How RawClip handles it
Camera audio is mixed underneath cleared music rather than carrying the video, so a clipped stretch of wind or engine noise does not decide how the highlight sounds. Where speech exists, the music steps back under it instead of the speech being pushed up into distortion.