Continuity
Also known as: continuity editing
Keeping the details consistent across cuts, so that direction, position, light and equipment do not change between two shots of one moment.
Updated
What it means
Continuity is the agreement between shots. A rider wearing a helmet in one clip and not in the next tells a viewer that these are different runs, whether or not anybody says so.
Direction is the strictest form. The 180-degree line exists because travel left to right has to stay left to right, and a reversal reads as a different event.
Light is the one nobody plans for. Clips from morning and afternoon of the same feature cut badly, and no grade fully hides a change in the direction of the sun.
How it works in practice
Action sports break it constantly and get away with it. A viewer accepts four different outfits in a season edit, because the subject is the riding rather than a narrative. The rules relax in proportion to how documentary the piece is.
Where it matters is inside a single run. A trick filmed from three angles has to look like one attempt, so Cutting on action on the same movement is what holds it together.
Weather and shadows are the practical limit. Filming a feature in one session rather than across a week is the only reliable fix, and Color matching handles the rest.
What to watch out for
Several takes intercut as one run is the classic failure. Two attempts spliced together look like a single impossible line, and attentive viewers notice the landing that never happened. Nothing else in editing is spotted so reliably by amateurs.
Equipment changes give it away. A Chest mount clip and a helmet angle of the same moment are fine; the same rider with and without a backpack is not.
Automatic assembly has no model of the world. Scene detection separates clips but cannot know that two of them are from different days, so continuity stays a human judgement.
How RawClip handles it
Clips are grouped by scene and ordered so that moments from one run stay together rather than being mixed with another attempt. Details like a change of outfit or of light are not something the analysis reasons about, which is why one session per edit gives the cleanest result.