Motocross
Also known as: MX, dirt bike racing
Racing dirt bikes on outdoor circuits of jumps and berms, which is loud, dusty and the most equipment-hostile filming there is.
Updated
What it means
Motocross is a circuit of built features. Jumps, berms, whoops and ruts in dirt, ridden in laps, which makes it predictable to film and brutal on anything placed near the track.
The jumps are what people film it for. A bike several metres up in the air with a rider extended out behind it is the image, and it happens at a known takeoff on every lap.
It differs from Enduro in repetition and from Supercross in scale. Outdoor, longer laps, natural light, and features large enough that conveying the scale of them is a genuine problem.
How it works in practice
Low at the landing is the shot. A camera on the ground where the bike touches down conveys the weight and the impact, and a Low-angle shot there is worth several from the infield.
A long lens from the outside of a berm shows the lean. Compression from distance keeps the bike and the bank in proportion, where a wide lens close up distorts both.
Roost is the hazard and the shot at once. Dirt thrown by a rear wheel fills a frame dramatically and coats a lens permanently, so a Lens protector and a cloth are standard.
What to watch out for
Dust ends sessions. A dry track coats absolutely everything within a few laps, and a camera that is not wiped between passes produces clips that look hazy for no apparent reason at all.
Noise destroys the audio entirely. A four-stroke at close range clips any microphone, so Audio clipping is the normal outcome, and the track sound is either recorded separately or replaced entirely.
Laps repeat identically. Ten passes over one jump is one clip, so the camera has to move between laps rather than the rider having to do something different each time.
How RawClip handles it
Jumps score as clear peaks and land naturally against a music cue, so a session built out of laps reduces to its best few airs. The engine audio is normally replaced rather than mixed, since what the microphone captured is mostly distortion.