Sports highlight
Also known as: competition highlight, event highlight
A highlight built around decisive attempts in competition, which carries a stricter contract than a general highlight reel does.
Updated
What it means
A sports highlight has obligations. The landed trick, the winning run, the crash that ended somebody's day, all have to be there regardless of how they look on screen afterwards.
That is the difference from a Highlight reel made for its own sake. One is chosen for effect; the other is chosen for the record of what happened, and leaving a moment out is an error of fact.
Completeness beats polish. A shaky clip of the decisive moment belongs in; a beautiful clip of a practice run does not. The event decides the content rather than the editor.
How it works in practice
Context has to come with each moment. A trick with no approach and no scoreboard is unreadable to anybody who was not there, so an Establishing shot does real work here. Scale is information.
Order is usually chronological, which is unusual. The event had a sequence and an audience that remembers it, so Sequence order follows the competition rather than a dramatic shape imposed afterwards.
Names and sound both matter. A Lower third identifying riders is expected in competition coverage, and a crowd reaction or a placed Sound effect carries the result better than the picture alone.
What to watch out for
Missing the decisive moment is unrecoverable. No amount of coverage substitutes for the one attempt that counted, which makes camera discipline more important here than selection ever is.
Dramatic reordering is read as dishonesty. Putting the best run last when it happened first misrepresents the event, which is acceptable in a Session edit and not in coverage of a result.
Automatic selection ranks on how a clip looks. Shot scoring has no idea which attempt was the winning one, so the must-have moments belong in the brief rather than in the ranking it produces.
How RawClip handles it
Scoring finds the strongest-looking moments, which in competition is not the same as the moments that mattered. Naming the decisive attempts in the brief is what makes the result usable as coverage rather than as a reel that happens to be accurate.