okay so this has been bugging me for a while and im finally asking. i shoot d-log on my air 2s and i feel like every time i sit down to edit a video i basically start from scratch. color grade, sync to music, cut down hours of footage, it takes me like a full weekend for a 2 minute video and by the end i hate everything ive made

i know people talk about luts but every time i drop one on my footage it looks either totally flat or weirdly orange and i end up just doing manual corrections anyway which defeats the point. also i have no system for organizing clips, i just dump everything in a premiere timeline and start scrubbing which is obviously not efficient

is there a smarter way to do this whole thing or is it just always gonna be a grind. curious what other people's actual day-to-day workflow looks like not just the theory of it

the lut thing is because d-log needs a base exposure correction before the lut goes on, most people put the lut directly on the raw d-log clip and wonder why it looks wrong. you usually need to bring up your exposure and get the waveform sitting in the right range first, then the lut does what its supposed to. theres a free plugin called lut robot or you can just do it manually with a curves node in resolve, either way it makes a huge difference

for organization i do all my culling in resolve before i even think about editing. watch everything once, mark the keepers, delete the garbage. i try to cut my footage down by like 80% before i make a single edit. takes discipline but it means when you're actually in the timeline you're only working with stuff that has a reason to be there

switching to davinci resolve for color work specifically was the thing that made grading feel less like a nightmare for me, even if you cut in premiere you can round trip to resolve just for the grade. the node based workflow sounds intimidating but once you have a template node structure saved it goes way faster than doing everything with adjustment layers in premiere

also on the music thing, i started picking the track first before i even look at my footage and it completely changed how i think about pacing. like the music almost tells you where the cuts should go instead of you trying to force the footage to fit some arbitrary rhythm you made up

two minute video taking a weekend is pretty normal early on though, dont be too hard on yourself. i still spend more time than i want to on anything thats actually gonna be posted somewhere