so anyway this has been bugging me for a while. i go out and shoot maybe 40-50 clips on a good day, get home, dump everything onto the drive, and then just kind of stare at premiere and feel overwhelmed. i end up spending like 4-5 hours on a 2 minute video and most of that is just scrubbing through footage trying to find the good bits.

i know i need a better system but i dont really know what that looks like. do people actually log their shots in the field or is that too much? i feel like by the time i get home i cant even remember which clips i thought were good when i was flying them. the video always turns out ok but the process feels really inefficient and kind of kills my motivation to edit at all tbh.

anyone have a workflow they actually stick to? not looking for something super complicated just something that makes the whole thing feel less chaotic

I had the exact same problem for the first like two years of shooting seriously. What finally clicked for me was doing a really fast first pass before anything else ? I'm talking just watching each clip at 2x speed and immediately deleting the obvious garbage. Shaky takeoffs, accidental recordings, stuff that's just bad. Don't even think about it, just kill it. Gets you down to maybe 60% of what you shot and already it feels more manageable.

Then I do a second pass and star the ones I actually want to use. In Premiere you can use labels or markers, in resolve theres the flagging system. Either way you end up with a much smaller pool to actually work with and it stops feeling so overwhelming. The whole thing takes maybe 20-30 minutes and its kind of meditative honestly, I do it the night I get home before I start any real editing.

i started voice memoing myself when im still out flying, just quick stuff like "clip 23 the reveal over the ridge that was the good one" and honestly it sounds dumb but it saves me so much time later. you dont have to do it for every single clip just the ones you're excited about in the moment. then when you get home you have a rough map of what to look for first instead of starting from zero

also unrelated but have you tried cutting to music before you place your clips? like find the track first, find the natural hits and cuts in the song, and then find footage to fill those slots. total game changer for pacing, way easier than trying to edit footage and find music after