just got back from a week in iceland and i am completely overwhelmed. i knew i was shooting a lot but i didnt really think about what comes after. im on premiere and i have probably 200+ gb of d-log footage plus some slog from a handheld camera and everything is just sitting in a folder on my drive right now.

normally for shorter stuff i just import, watch through, pick the good bits, grade, done. but that obviously isnt going to work here. does anyone have a system for dealing with a big dump of footage like this? like do you cull first and then import into premiere, or do you import everything and use proxies, or what. i feel like if i dont figure out a workflow im just never going to finish this thing and it'll sit on a drive forever like my portugal trip from lol

proxies are your friend here, dont skip that step. what i do is import everything into premiere first, let it make proxies overnight, and then the next day go through and do a rough selects pass where im just rating clips. anything that looks bad on the first watch gets hidden, anything with potential gets a color label. i dont watch the whole clip, usually just skim through to see if theres a usable moment in there. once ive got a rough selects bin i start actually assembling.

the other thing that really helped me was deciding on the story before i touched the edit. like for a trip like iceland, what is the video actually about. if you dont know that going in youll just pile up pretty shots with no shape to them. even just deciding its a 3 minute highlights film vs a longer documentary style thing changes how you cut it.

honestly i moved a lot of my culling to DaVinci resolve just for the color management and the cut page is weirdly good for quick assembly. but thats probably not helpful if youre already in a premiere ecosystem. the portugal thing is very relatable btw, i have an entire folder called "spain maybe someday" that has not been opened since 2021