Surfing
Also known as: surf, wave riding
Riding waves on a board, filmed from a distance that flattens everything or from inside the water, with no repeat of any single wave.
Updated
What it means
Surfing happens a long way from anywhere a camera can stand. The action is out at the break, which means either a long lens from the beach or somebody in the water with a housing.
No wave repeats. A ride is unique and unrepeatable, which puts surfing closer to Rally than to a skatepark in how it has to be covered.
The waiting dominates the session. A Wave count of ten rides in two hours is normal and the rest is paddling and sitting, which is the Dead time that fills a card whenever a camera is left running.
How it works in practice
The beach position lives or dies on focal length. Compression is the only thing that makes a wave face and a turn readable from the sand, and a wide lens produces water with a dot on it.
A water housing is the other discipline entirely. Being in the wave produces the angles that define modern surf footage, and swimming in the impact zone is a skill separate from filming.
A Lineup shot does structural work. A wide view of a set arriving gives a viewer the context that every tight shot afterwards relies on, which is how a surf section gets built.
What to watch out for
Salt water on the front element is the constant enemy. Water droplets on the lens from spray or rain are the most common reason a surf card produces nothing, and nothing afterwards removes a drop over the subject.
Glare off the water defeats metering. Sun on a moving surface swings exposure constantly, and a Polarizing filter (CPL) with a fixed exposure is what keeps a session consistent.
The camera runs through all the waiting. Hours of paddling fill a card around ten usable rides, which is one of the worst ratios in any discipline here.
How RawClip handles it
Hours containing ten rides is exactly the input this handles: the paddling and the sitting are filtered out as dead time and the rides are scored individually. A wide lineup shot is kept where one exists, because it gives the sequence somewhere to start.