ok so this is kind of embarrassing but i currently have like four different folders on my desktop named things like "drone footage FINAL" and "drone footage FINAL v2" and "drone stuff october maybe" and its a disaster. i spend more time hunting for clips than actually editing and at this point ive probably re-edited the same lake footage three different times because i forgot i already did it

im using davinci resolve and i like it but i have no system. i shoot in d-log on my air 2s and i know i should be color grading but half the time i just slap a lut on it and call it done because i cant figure out what im actually going for look-wise

curious how more experienced folks here handle the ingestion and organization side before you even get to editing. and is there a point where the color work starts to feel less overwhelming or is it always kind of a puzzle every time you sit down

the folder chaos is so real, i did this for like two years before i finally just committed to a structure and stuck with it. what i do now is one top level folder per shoot with the date first so it sorts chronologically ? like -11-03_lakefront or whatever ? and inside that i have raw, exports, and project subfolders. takes about three minutes to set up before i copy anything off the card and it has genuinely changed my life

for the color stuff in resolve, the thing that helped me most was stopping trying to make it look like specific luts and instead just learning what the curves tool actually does. i spent a sunday afternoon just messing with it on footage i didnt care about and it clicked eventually. d-log has a lot of latitude so youre not going to wreck it easily, just experiment more

luts are not cheating by the way, plenty of professional colorists use them as a starting point and then adjust from there. the issue is most people apply them at 100% opacity when they should be dialing them back to like 40 or 50 and then tweaking contrast and saturation manually to match the actual lighting conditions of that specific shoot. that one change made my d-log grades look way more consistent

also unrelated but are you shooting in 4k 60 or 4k 30 mostly? i ask because i switched to shooting everything at 60 for the slow down option and it changed how i think about which shots are worth keeping