Windsurfing
Also known as: wind surfing, wave sailing
Sailing a board with a rig attached to it, where the sail is always in frame and hides the rider from about half of the useful angles.
Updated
What it means
Windsurfing puts a sail directly on the board, which changes the riding and the filming together. The rig is large, bright and permanently in shot, so a frame is visually busy in a way that Surfing never is.
The sail blocks roughly half the angles. A rider is hidden behind their own equipment from whole arcs of the compass, and that constraint decides where a camera can usefully stand before anything else does.
Wave sailing and flat-water speed sailing are different subjects. One is peaked, with jumps and loops, and the other is sustained, with long planing runs, and material from the two does not cut together naturally.
How it works in practice
A mount on the rig gives an angle nothing else provides. A camera on the mast or the boom shows the sail and the rider together, although vibration through a mast is considerably worse than it looks.
The beach position needs a long lens. Sailing happens well offshore and compression is what makes the rider and the sail readable, where a wide frame from the sand gives water and a coloured triangle.
Jumps are the moment to be ready for. A loop or a jump off a wave is the one event with a clear peak, so a camera already running and already pointed beats reacting to anything.
What to watch out for
The conditions that allow sailing punish equipment. Wind strong enough to plane is hard on a drone and harder on anybody holding a camera, and Wind resistance decides whether an aerial angle is possible at all.
Salt spray reaches further than it appears to. Equipment that seems safely back from the water collects a film of salt across a session, and a rinse afterwards matters as much as a Lens protector during it.
Long planing runs get undervalued by selection. A sustained run has no peak inside it, so treating the whole run as a single unit gives a better result than hunting for a moment that is not there.
How RawClip handles it
Jumps and loops read as clear peaks, while long planing runs are steady movement with nothing inside them to score, so wave sailing reduces more readily than speed sailing does. Clips from the rig mount and from the beach are cut together so the sail does not hide the riding.