curious what other people actually do when they sit down to edit drone footage, like the full process. i feel like i spend way too long just scrubbing through clips and cant figure out a good system. right now i basically import everything, watch it all once, then try to cut to music but i always end up with like 45 minutes of footage for a 2 minute video and the selection process kills me. takes hours just to get to the fun part.

do people use proxy workflows for 4k? im on a pretty old macbook and premiere crawls when i have a lot of clips open. also wondering if anyone edits in resolve instead, ive heard good things but dont want to learn a whole new program if my current setup is fine enough. not making this for clients or anything just personal projects and maybe instagram reels

proxies are genuinely a lifechanger for older machines, dont sleep on that. in premiere you can right click your clips in the project panel and generate proxies at like 1/4 resolution and then toggle them on with a little button in the playback window, it made my old 2019 macbook actually usable for 4k drone stuff. the quality doesnt matter for editing since it renders from the originals at the end.

my actual workflow is i dump everything into a folder organized by location and date, then i go through and just mark the stuff that made me go oh that looks good on first watch, usually that cuts my footage down by like 70% right there. then i pick a song first before i touch any clips because once you have the energy of the music figured out the cuts kind of suggest themselves. resolve is fantastic but honestly for reels premiere is totally fine, id only switch if you want to get deeper into color grading because resolves color tools are on another level

i switched to resolve about a year ago and the learning curve wasnt as bad as i expected, maybe a week or two to feel comfortable for basic stuff. the fusion tab is confusing and i still barely touch it but for just cutting and grading its pretty intuitive once you get the hang of the node system. that said if you're making reels and not getting paid for it theres really no urgent reason to switch, just use what works. the proxy thing is def the move though regardless of what software youre in