ok so this has been bugging me for months and i finally need to ask. my editing workflow is a complete disaster. i come back from a shoot with like 40 clips, dump them in a folder, start an rough cut in premiere, then two weeks later im back at that location and i have no idea which clips i already used, which ones i rejected, what color grade i was doing, nothing. i've lost actual good shots because i couldn't find them again.

do you have a system? like an actual system you stick to? i've heard people talk about using proxy workflows and i sort of understand what that means but i don't know if its overkill for one-man-band stuff. i edit on a pretty decent laptop so rendering isnt a huge problem but scrubbing 4k log footage is still a bit laggy sometimes.

also separate question sort of ? do you keep your raw files forever or do you cull agressively? i have about 2tb of drone footage sitting on a drive and i genuinely dont know if 70% of it is worth keeping

the folder structure thing is a lifesaver once you commit to it. i do date then location then a short description, so something like -09-14_cornwall_cliffs and inside that i have subfolders for raw, selects, project files, and exports. sounds fussy but takes about 30 seconds to set up and saves hours later. i also drop a quick text file in the raw folder with notes about conditions, what i was going for, if anything went wrong ? takes two minutes and future me is always grateful

on the culling question i'm pretty brutal now. if a clip is slightly out of focus, if the movement is jerky in a way i cant fix, if theres nothing interesting happening ? delete. storage is cheap but your time going through bad footage is not. i keep maybe 30% of what i shoot

proxies are worth it even for solo stuff, especially with log footage in 4k. in resolve you can generate optimized media in like one click and then forget about it, scrubbing becomes completely smooth. the only annoying part is you have to remember to do it at the start of every project but once its a habit its fine. i wasted probably a year editing without proxies and genuinely dont know why i waited so long

and yeah 2tb of raw footage is a lot to just sit on a drive. i went through mine last winter on a rainy weekend and it was kind of painful but i cut it down massively. most of it was just test clips and stuff i was never going to use anyway