ok so this might be a bit of a ramble but bear with me. i shot a bunch of footage last weekend for a little travel edit im making, probably 45 minutes of raw clips total from two batteries, and when i sat down to edit i just kind of stared at the screen for an hour. i dont have any real system for going through footage and it's making the whole process feel like a chore instead of fun.

right now i just dump everything into premiere, skim through it, and start cutting stuff i like into a sequence. but then i end up with way too much and have to cut it down again and it takes forever. i know some people do a whole rating and logging thing before they even touch the timeline but that sounds like even more work upfront? im using premiere pro btw, nothing fancy. i shoot log so i also have to deal with the color correction before i can really tell what looks good which adds another layer of annoying to the whole thing.

whats your actual workflow, like step by step. do you pick your music first or edit picture first

music first, always. at least for me. i find a track that fits the vibe before i even open my footage folder, because the music kind of tells me what the edit wants to be ? the pacing, the mood, where the cuts should land. then when im going through clips i already have a sense of whether something fits or not instead of just going "oh that looks cool" and hoarding everything.

for the log footage thing, i just apply a quick lut to all my clips right at the start, like a viewing lut not a final grade, just so everything looks roughly normal while im cutting. do the real grade at the end. saved me so much time not squinting at flat footage. and honestly? dont rate and log everything, life is too short. just watch each clip once at like 2x speed and immediately delete the obvious garbage before it ever hits your timeline. your pile shrinks fast that way

i switched to resolve from premiere a while back and the media page with the star ratings genuinely helped me stop drowning in clips. but thats probably not super helpful if youre already comfortable in premiere. the thing that actually made the biggest difference for me was just making myself do a "selects pass" in a separate sequence before touching the actual edit ? basically just drag in everything i think is usable, in no particular order, and then cut the real edit from that smaller pool. feels like extra work but it means im not scrolling through 45 minutes when im trying to make a creative decision at 2am