Exposure analysis
Also known as: brightness analysis, automatic exposure check
An automatic read of how bright each clip is, used to drop the washed out and near black stretches before anything else looks at them.
Updated
What it means
Exposure analysis measures what a Histogram would show, across every clip, without anybody opening them. The useful output is not a number but a verdict about each stretch of footage.
This part is blown out, this part is too dark to recover, this part is fine. Footage from a moving camera swings through all three in a single ride, which is why the check runs per stretch rather than per file.
It is one of the cheapest quality gates available, so it usually runs early alongside Blur detection, to shrink the amount of material that the expensive stages have to consider at all.
How it works in practice
The measurement looks at clipped extremes rather than average brightness. A frame averaging correctly can still be half white sky and half black forest, and both halves are unusable in an edit.
Counting how many pixels sit hard against the ceiling catches Highlight clipping that an average hides completely, which is the same reason cameras offer Zebras rather than a single brightness readout.
Thresholds differ by activity. Snow and water legitimately push the top of the range, so a bar tuned on forest footage throws away perfectly good powder clips without ever being obviously wrong.
What to watch out for
Intent is invisible to the measurement. A silhouette against a sunset reads as badly underexposed and a deliberately bright shot reads as a mistake, so an automatic drop can remove the most striking clip on the card.
Log footage breaks naive checks outright. A Log profile recording is meant to look flat and grey before grading, and a system judging it raw will report an entire shoot as lifeless.
The safe design is to weight rather than delete. Marking a clip down leaves it available if nothing better exists, while discarding it makes the judgement final on the basis of one cheap measurement.
How RawClip handles it
Clips are checked for clipped highlights and crushed shadows before the search for moments starts, so the analysis spends its attention on footage that could actually survive into a cut rather than on a white frame of sky.