Raw footage
Also known as: raw video, unedited footage, source footage
The original, unedited video files straight from the camera, before any trimming, cutting or color work. The source material every edit is built from.
Updated
What it means
Raw footage is everything the camera recorded, exactly as it came off the card: every take, every chapter, the false starts and the long stretches where nothing happens. Nothing has been trimmed, reordered or graded yet. It is the material an editor works from, and the opposite of a finished highlight reel.
In everyday video talk, raw simply means unedited. It is not the same as a RAW file format such as ProRes RAW or CinemaDNG, which stores sensor data and is mostly found on cinema cameras. Action cameras, phones and drones record compressed MP4 or MOV files, usually in H.264 or H.265, and those files count as raw footage until someone edits them.
How it works in practice
Raw footage piles up fast. A camera shooting 4K at a Bitrate of around 100 Mbps writes roughly 45 GB per hour, so a weekend with two action cameras and a drone can easily reach several hundred gigabytes. On GoPro cards you will also find LRV and THM companions next to each MP4; only the MP4s are the real footage.
A sensible workflow is to copy every card to a computer, make a second backup, and sort folders by date and camera before doing anything else. Editors then review the material, often through lightweight proxy files, and log where the good moments are. Only after that does the actual cutting begin.
What to watch out for
The biggest risk is losing it. Formatting a card before the copy is verified, or keeping the only copy on one drive, has ended plenty of trips with nothing to show. Copy, check that file counts and sizes match, and only then format.
The second risk is drowning in it. Most raw footage is dead time, and the bigger the pile, the more likely it is to sit untouched on a drive for years. Deleting obvious junk early helps, but do not re-encode or shrink the originals to save space: every extra round of compression throws away detail that the final export can never get back.
How RawClip handles it
RawClip takes raw footage as it comes off the camera: MP4 or MOV, H.264 or H.265, from 1080p up to 4K and 5.3K, from several cameras in one order. The upload is resumable and runs in the background. Your raw files are deleted as soon as the highlight is rendered and are never used to train models.