Ultramarathon
Also known as: ultra, ultra running
Running beyond marathon distance, often on trails and often through the night, which makes the footage a power problem before it is anything else.
Updated
What it means
An ultramarathon is any race longer than a marathon, and in practice that means trails, mountains and many hours of continuous movement at a pace that looks gentle on screen.
The event outlasts every piece of equipment involved. A hundred-kilometre race runs through a day and into a night, which no camera, battery or Memory card covers without a plan made beforehand.
The interest is in change rather than speed. Light, terrain, weather and the runner condition all shift across a race, and that progression is the story the footage has to carry.
How it works in practice
Filming in short deliberate bursts is the only workable method. A few seconds at each landmark, aid station and change of light builds a day without asking a battery to record one continuously.
Aid stations are the natural chapters. A fixed camera at a checkpoint catches the arrivals, and the contrast between the first and the last visit tells the race better than any single clip.
Night running needs a decision in advance. A head torch is the only light there is, so the Low-light performance limit arrives early and the night material is either accepted as grainy or skipped.
What to watch out for
Power is the whole problem. A race lasting a day against a camera lasting an hour means Cold-weather battery life and charging at checkpoints get planned alongside the food and the socks.
Hours of running look identical to each other. Continuous forward footage of a trail is the least varied material in any sport, and a long recording is almost entirely Unusable footage.
The runner has no attention to spare. Operating a camera while depleted is the first thing to be abandoned, so whatever was not automatic simply does not get recorded after the halfway point.
How RawClip handles it
A race recorded in short bursts across a day and a night reduces well, because each burst was already a decision. The selection keeps the changes in light, terrain and condition, and the clips are brought into colour agreement across conditions that varied enormously.