been meaning to ask this for a while. i shoot in d-log on my air 3 and i have a rough sense of what im supposed to do in resolve ? bring in the footage, apply a lut, do some color work ? but honestly my process feels pretty random and i never end up with consistent results between projects. some edits look great, others feel flat or weirdly oversaturated depending on what lut i grabbed that day.

like is there an actual order of operations people follow? i know some folks do their primary correction first then apply the lut then do secondary work but i've also seen people do it the opposite way. and how do you even organize your clips before you start cutting, do you go through everything first or just start dumping things in the timeline and figure it out as you go

not looking for a tutorial or anything just curious what actually works for real people in practice

honestly my workflow is pretty scrappy and i've been doing this for years so take that as either reassurance or a warning lol. i dump everything into a bin, do one quick pass just watching clips and marking the obvious keepers with a color flag, then i build a rough assembly from those. i dont touch color at all until the edit is basically locked because theres nothing worse than spending an hour grading a clip and then cutting it anyway.

for d-log specifically i always do a node for exposure correction first before the lut goes on, otherwise the lut is reacting to footage that's too dark or too bright and it just looks wrong. then lut on the next node, then creative color on another node after that. keeps everything clean and you can dial each piece up or down without messing with the others. the inconsistency you're describing sounds like you might be skipping that first exposure correction step, d-log can vary a lot shot to shot especially if lighting changed

this might be a slightly different take but i actually switched from resolve to capcut for quick turnaround stuff and honestly for social media edits it's fine? like for longer cinematic projects i still use resolve but i used to spend so much time in resolve tweaking things that nobody watching on instagram is going to notice anyway. not saying resolve isnt worth learning, it definitely is, just sometimes the workflow that gets stuff finished is better than the perfect one that takes forever

also for the lut consistency thing, have you tried making your own? theres a few tutorials on building a base lut from your specific camera settings and then you at least have a consistent starting point every time instead of grabbing whatever looks cool that week