Dead time
Also known as: downtime footage, filler footage, dead air
The stretches of a recording where nothing interesting happens, such as lift rides, climbs, setup and waiting, which fill most raw action footage.
Updated
What it means
Dead time is footage without a moment worth showing. On a ski day it is the chairlift, the queue and the stop to adjust a binding. On a bike it is the climb back up. On a drone flight it is takeoff, hovering while you frame the shot and the flight home. It gets recorded because action cameras are usually left running so the good part is never missed.
In a typical session, dead time makes up most of the raw footage, often far more than half of it. Cutting it is the first and most mechanical step of any edit, and the reason a two-hour recording can shrink to a two-minute highlight without losing anything that matters.
How it works in practice
Some dead time is obvious: the lens pointing at the ground, black frames from inside a pocket, a static view of the lift bar. Some is subtler, like a run that looks fine but adds nothing new compared with the three before it. Editors scrub at high speed, watch the audio waveform for spikes from shouts or impacts, and set in and out points around the action.
You can also reduce it while filming. Record shorter clips instead of one endless take when you can, and use Time-lapse or TimeWarp for long transfers you still want to show. On a drone, starting the recording only once you are in position saves more editing than any trick later.
What to watch out for
Cutting every quiet second can backfire. A reel that is wall-to-wall peak action, with no breathing room, feels exhausting and loses context. A few seconds of the view from the top or friends laughing on the lift work as B-roll that sets up the next big moment. The aim is to cut boring footage, not all calm footage.
The opposite mistake is keeping a section because it was hard work to film. Viewers cannot feel the effort of a climb, only its length. Also watch for an accidental jump cut when you remove a few seconds from the middle of one continuous shot: the sudden skip looks like a glitch unless it is deliberate.
How RawClip handles it
Removing dead time is one of the core jobs RawClip does for you. The AI analyzes motion, faces and peak action across all your clips, drops the dull and duplicate stretches with automatic highlight detection, and fits what remains to the length you choose and the beat of the music.