ok so this has been bugging me for a while. i fly probably twice a week and i have like months worth of footage that i havent done anything with because every time i open premiere i just dont know what to pick or where to start and then i close it again without doing anything. i think the problem is i shoot way too much and then the whole thing feels overwhelming.

does anyone have like a basic structure they follow for going from the SD card to an actual finished video? i dont mean the technical settings stuff, more like the actual process ? how do you decide what to keep, when do you color grade, do you pick music first or edit picture first, that kind of thing. im using premiere pro on a windows machine and most of my footage is d-log so thats probably not helping either because everything looks washed out and grey and it kills my motivation before i even start

music first, always. or at least for me. i find a track i genuinely like, listen to it a few times and get a feel for where the energy changes, and then i go find clips that fit those moments rather than trying to make the music fit my clips. it totally changes how you approach the selects because suddenly you know you need a punchy reveal for that beat drop at 1:20 or whatever. makes the whole thing feel way more intentional even if technically youre just reverse engineering it

also for the d-log thing ? apply a quick lut just to get it looking normal before you do anything else. even a free one. dont try to edit with flat footage, its demoralizing and you cant actually judge what looks good

i had exactly this problem for ages. what actually helped me was just setting a hard limit ? one minute or less, thats the whole video, done. no epic 5 minute cinematic journey. when you constrain yourself like that you cull way faster because you have to be brutal and it removes that feeling of needing every good clip to be in there. finish something short and terrible and actually export it. having finished things is so much more motivating than having perfect half-finished projects sitting on a drive somewhere