Speed flying
Also known as: speed riding, mini wing
Descending a mountain under a very small wing, sometimes on skis, at speeds that make following the subject genuinely difficult.
Updated
What it means
A speed wing is deliberately too small to soar. It descends fast and flies close to the terrain, which is the opposite intention from a paraglider and produces a completely different kind of footage.
The speed is the filming problem. A pilot descending a face faster than a drone can follow means most external positions see the subject for a single moment, from an angle nobody chose, and then nothing at all.
The ski version adds contact with the ground. Touching down, skiing a section and lifting off again is the signature of the discipline, and it is what makes the proximity readable.
How it works in practice
Worn cameras do almost all of it. A Helmet mount or a riser mount records the whole descent regardless of where anybody is standing or what the weather did, which is the only reliable coverage available on a flight of this kind.
The wing in frame gives the shot scale. A camera angled to include a line or the canopy edge tells a viewer what they are looking at, where a clean forward view is just terrain passing.
A fixed position near a known ground contact is the one external shot worth setting up. Everything else is a subject crossing frame too quickly to read.
What to watch out for
Wind noise is total. Flight at this speed produces nothing usable on a microphone, so Wind noise reduction is a partial measure and the soundtrack is built afterwards.
A drone cannot keep up. A pilot descending at speed outruns most aircraft, so an attempt at a Tracking shot from the air produces a receding dot rather than a following shot.
The margins are small and the camera is a distraction. Flying close to terrain while thinking about a framing is how incidents happen, and the mount is set before launch for that reason.
How RawClip handles it
A continuous fast descent reads as one long moment, and the selection keeps the sections where the terrain or the wing gives the speed a reference. The audio is replaced, since nothing recorded in that airflow is usable.