Karting
Also known as: go-karting, kart racing
Racing small open chassis on tight circuits, where the ground clearance does more for the sense of speed than the actual speed does.
Updated
What it means
A kart is fast because it is low. Forty miles an hour a few centimetres off the tarmac feels and films like considerably more, which is the opposite of the problem most motorsport has.
The circuits are short and the laps repeat. A session is twenty near-identical laps of the same corners, which makes it unusually easy to film well and unusually hard to film variously.
It is the entry point to circuit racing, which shows in the access. Nobody is kept behind a fence, so a filmer can stand where a Track day would never allow.
How it works in practice
A mounted camera on the chassis is the defining shot. Low, forward-facing and close to the ground, which is exactly where the sensation lives, and a Roll bar mount or an adhesive pad is what holds it there.
The best external position is at a corner apex. Low to the ground with a kart passing a metre away produces scale that a view from the bridge never does.
Vibration is the thing to plan for. A kart chassis has no suspension, so everything mounted to it shakes, and HyperSmooth or a soft mount is what makes the footage watchable.
What to watch out for
Twenty laps produce one clip. The repetition is close to total, and Duplicate shot detection reduces a whole session to a handful of passes, which is the correct answer and a lot of card wasted getting there.
Engine noise overwhelms the microphone. A two-stroke at head height destroys any onboard audio, so the track sound is a separate recording or it gets replaced entirely.
Indoor circuits are a lighting problem. Artificial light at the wrong shutter produces flicker, and the mixed colour temperature makes Auto white balance drift through every single lap.
How RawClip handles it
Repeated laps of one circuit are collapsed to the strongest passes, so a long session still produces a short sequence. The mounted low angle tends to score well on motion, and the onboard audio is replaced with music as a matter of course.