Dive shot
Also known as: dive, drone dive
A nose-down descent flown straight at the subject from height, trading altitude for speed so the camera arrives at the action.
Updated
What it means
A dive begins high and ends low, with the nose pointed at whatever is about to happen. Nothing else in aerial work compresses distance that quickly, which is why it reads as a beginning rather than a middle.
The move properly belongs to an FPV drone, where pitch and throttle are manual and the fall can be stopped a few metres above a rider's head. Sticks do the arresting, not software.
A camera aircraft approximates it by descending while the gimbal tilts down, though speed limits and Obstacle avoidance keep the result far gentler than a hand-flown plunge.
How it works in practice
Framing decides whether the descent reads as motion or as wobble. A wide Field of view (FOV) exaggerates the plunge and keeps the horizon available as a reference, while anything tighter magnifies every small correction.
Exposure swings hard as the lens travels from bright sky to shaded ground, so pilots lock it before committing and hold shutter near double the frame rate. In daylight that means an ND filter for drone rather than a narrower aperture.
One clean dive per location is usually enough. The move is loud visually, and two of them in the same edit cancel each other out, so the second attempt is better spent elsewhere.
What to watch out for
Automatic selection likes dives, because the motion is continuous and one-directional. What it cannot judge from the opening frames is whether the pilot completed the descent or bailed out of it.
Aborted attempts left among the uploaded Drone footage therefore compete with the good take, and sometimes win on sharpness alone. Deleting the bailouts on the card is quicker than arguing with the result.
Ground rush also hides problems. A dive that looked thrilling in FPV goggles can arrive rolling slightly, and that tilt becomes obvious the moment it sits next to level Aerial footage.
How RawClip handles it
Descents score well during analysis because the motion is unambiguous and easy to place against a music cue. Repeated attempts at the same dive are treated as near duplicates, so one survives into the assembled highlight and the others stay out of it.