Gravel cycling
Also known as: gravel riding, adventure cycling
Riding unsurfaced roads on a drop-bar bike, filmed for landscape and distance rather than for any single moment of action.
Updated
What it means
Gravel riding is about covering ground. Long days on unsurfaced roads with no features to session at all, which makes it a travel subject rather than a trick subject.
That changes what a clip is for. Nothing in a gravel session is a peak moment, so the material that exists is landscape, movement, weather and texture rather than an attempt at anything.
It is closer to Road cycling footage than to a trail discipline. The speed is steady, the surface varies, and the interest is in where the ride goes rather than what happens on it.
How it works in practice
A Travel montage is the natural form. Short shots of road surface, light, distance and a rider moving through it, cut to music, which is what the material actually supports.
A drone covers the scale that nothing else can. Long straight sections across open country are exactly the situation an aerial pass is built for, and one good aerial pass can carry a whole section of an edit.
Telemetry adds the information the picture lacks. A Telemetry overlay with distance and elevation gives a viewer the scale of a day that otherwise looks like a pleasant ride.
What to watch out for
Hours of riding produce very little. A six-hour day yields only a few minutes worth keeping, which is the worst Footage-to-highlight ratio of almost any discipline there is.
Mounted footage is monotonous here. A handlebar camera on gravel for an hour is one shot, and nothing about the surface changes enough to make a second clip from it worth having.
Dust reaches everything. An unsurfaced road coats a lens in very little time, and a camera that was perfectly clean at the start of a descent is smeared by the time it reaches the bottom.
How RawClip handles it
Long rides with little distinct action still produce a short sequence, since the selection keeps the landscape and the movement rather than needing peaks to work from. Hours of unchanging mounted footage are filtered out as near duplicates rather than being reviewed by anybody.