Unusable footage
Also known as: rejects, bin pile
The pile of clips nobody argues about: a pocket recording, a lens under water droplets, a camera pointed at the inside of a bag.
Updated
What it means
Unusable is a narrower category than bad. A weak clip is a judgement call, where a recording of a jacket lining or two minutes of a car floor is a decision nobody needs to make twice.
Action cameras generate it in volume. A camera left running between runs, a button pressed in a pocket and a housing that fogged all produce files that were never going to contain anything.
It is distinct from material that is merely flawed. An Out-of-focus clip or a shaky one might still be the only coverage of a moment; this pile has no such argument available.
How it works in practice
Deleting it on the card is the one thing that always pays. Removing it before an offload shortens the copy, the review and the storage, and nothing is ever lost by doing it.
A quick pass at thumbnails finds most of it. Scrubbing is not necessary, because a recording of a pocket is identifiable from a single Frame grab at any size.
It is also the honest measure of a session. The proportion of a card in this pile is what a Keeper rate is really describing, and it improves with filming habits rather than with equipment.
What to watch out for
Nobody does it, which is the whole problem. The pile gets copied, backed up, uploaded and reviewed repeatedly, and every one of those steps is longer because of files nobody will ever watch.
Occasionally something survives in it. A pocket recording with usable audio, or a fogged clip with a readable moment, which is why a glance beats a blanket deletion.
It accumulates into a storage problem. Several seasons of it fills a drive, and a Footage backlog is partly made of material that was never footage in any useful sense of the word.
How RawClip handles it
Clips with no usable content are filtered out before anything is ranked, so a card that includes pocket recordings and fogged housings still produces a clean result. Deleting them first makes the upload shorter, which is the only part it affects.