Out-of-focus clip
Also known as: soft clip, focus miss
A clip where the subject never settles on the sharp plane, because autofocus hunted, locked onto something else or simply landed behind the rider.
Updated
What it means
A focus miss is unrecoverable in a way exposure problems are not. Brightness can be pushed around afterwards, and detail that was never resolved by the lens does not exist anywhere in the file to recover.
Three failures account for almost all of them. Autofocus hunting through a whole pass, a lock onto a foreground branch or a raindrop, and a subject arriving closer than the camera was focused.
Action cameras mostly avoid the problem by not having the feature. A Fixed focus lens is sharp from a metre to infinity and cannot miss, which is why mounted footage rarely suffers from this.
How it works in practice
Locking focus beats trusting it. On a body with Autofocus, setting it once on the spot where the action will happen removes the hunting entirely and is faster than any tracking mode.
A smaller aperture buys margin. Stopping down deepens the zone that is acceptably sharp, so a slight misjudgement stays usable rather than becoming a clip nobody can use.
Checking one clip on a real screen is the only reliable verification. Focus looks fine on a camera display at any size, and the miss appears the moment it is seen on a laptop.
What to watch out for
Sharpening does not help. Sharpening raises local contrast and makes a soft clip look harsher rather than sharper, and the result reads as processed on top of being soft.
It hides behind motion. A clip panning quickly looks acceptable because nothing is still long enough to judge, and the same material looks soft the moment it is slowed down.
It belongs in the pile of Unusable footage more often than people accept. A soft clip of a good moment is still a soft clip, and keeping it rarely survives a second viewing.
How RawClip handles it
Sharpness is one of the things scoring measures, so a soft clip loses to cleaner coverage of the same moment. Where a focus miss is the only footage of something, the clip is used short rather than held, because the softness becomes obvious the longer it stays on screen.