How to sort snowboard and ski footage by person
Ride every weekend with the same crew and a season leaves you with several hundred clips. Sorting them is the hard part, because mountain footage hides faces almost completely — most of the time goes into working out who is even in the shot. Here's how to make that fast.
Why mountain footage is harder to sort than anything else
One thing separates it from surf or everyday video: everybody's face is covered. Helmet, goggles, neck warmer — there is almost nothing left to go on. Three more things pile on top.
- The subject is far away. Filmed from across a slope, a rider is small in frame and the face is smaller still.
- Snow blows out the exposure. Shoot into the light and the rider is a silhouette.
- Cold chops your clips up. Batteries drain fast, so you record in short bursts and end up with far more files than a warm-weather session would produce.
Sort by outerwear and board, not by face
On a mountain the reliable identifier isn't the face — it's jacket colour, helmet colour and board graphic. None of them change all day, which makes them better than a face, not worse.
So shoot a reference clip at the start of the day. Before you drop in, have everyone look at the camera for a second or two. Later that one clip gives you the whole key: blue jacket is Ji-hoon, black helmet with the yellow board is Se-yeong. Sorting after that is mechanical.
whosewave pulls four moments from different points in each clip and shows them together. When one frame is blown out, another often isn't — which matters more here than anywhere else, because snow exposure swings so much within a single run.
When the whole crew is in one clip
Snowboard footage always includes runs with several riders in the same shot. It's tempting to agonise over whose folder that belongs in. The answer is: everyone's.
whosewave lets you tag more than one name on a single clip. When you run the sort, the original moves into the first person's folder and a copy lands in each of the others. Everyone in the crew ends up with that run in their own folder.
If you'd rather not touch the originals at all, choose copy instead of move when you run the sort and the source folder stays exactly as it was. If disk space is tight, move is the better choice.
When the footage comes from several cameras
A crew usually has a GoPro, a couple of phones and a drone going at once. The problem is that every device names files differently, so dumping them into one folder scrambles the order.
| Device | Example filename | Sorts by |
|---|---|---|
| GoPro | GX010042.MP4 | Clip number |
| Phone | 20260118_141233.mp4 | Date and time |
| Drone (DJI) | DJI_0031.MP4 | Per-aircraft counter |
Sort by name and you get clumps of each device, not the order things were actually filmed. Don't fight it. Keep one folder per device and run the sort once for each — the results land in the same set of named folders anyway.
GoPro's .LRV and .THM sidecar files are skipped automatically, so there's
no need to clean them out first. The GoPro guide covers those in detail.
Throwing out lift rides and accidental recordings
Mountain footage is mostly things you'll never use: the camera left running on the way up, a glove hitting the button by mistake, three minutes of sky after a slam. It's easily half the card.
Don't tag those — skip them. Anything left untagged is collected separately when you run the sort, so you can look through that one folder afterwards and delete in bulk. Deciding what to bin while you're still sorting is what makes the job slow.
The sorting run, step by step
- Copy the cards and phone clips to your computer. Keep a separate folder per device.
- Watch the reference clip first so you have the day's colour key in your head.
- Open whosewave and choose the folder. Everything happens inside the browser — no clip is ever uploaded anywhere.
- Tag each clip. Type a name the first time someone appears, then use the 1–9 keys after that. Press several keys for a crew run.
- Run the sort. You get a summary of which folders will be created and how many clips go in each before anything moves.
Nothing is touched until you confirm. How it works covers the controls in more detail.
If the previews are just white
Snow is the hardest thing there is for a camera to expose, so blown-out previews are normal. That's the footage itself, not the player — you'd see the same in any app. Usually one of the four frames catches a treeline or a shadow, and that's the one that identifies the rider.
Previews that don't appear at all are a different problem, almost always HEVC decoding; Camera support explains the fix. And note that even with no previews at all, tagging and sorting still work — moving files has nothing to do with decoding them.