okay so this is kind of embarrassing but i have like 200gb of drone footage across three different trips and i genuinely dont know where to start. some of it is log profile, some is standard color, some clips i remember being good and some i have no idea. i use premiere but honestly i just drag stuff in and start cutting which i know is probably not the right way to do it.

i've seen people talk about doing color grading before editing vs after and i dont really understand the order of operations here. also do people actually watch ALL their footage back before editing or do you kind of just know what you got while you were flying? im not trying to be a professional or anything, just want my travel videos to actually look decent and consistent. any tips on where to even begin would be helpful, even just how you name your files or whatever.

dont be embarrassed, my first year of footage is sitting in a folder called "drone stuff 2021" with zero organization lol. what finally worked for me was just doing a quick pass through everything first, like 2x speed, and marking the obvious rejects so i can ignore them. in premiere you can use the label colors to flag keepers without making any cuts yet. for the log vs standard thing, honestly the easiest fix going forward is just pick one and stick with it per trip. mixing them is a nightmare to color match later. if you shot log, apply a lut first before you do anything else so you can actually see what you're working with, otherwise it all looks washed out and depressing and you wont want to edit any of it.

so anyway i went through pretty much the exact same thing last year and the thing that helped most was treating the selects process like its its own separate session before i even open a project. just go through in finder or whatever file browser and rename the good clips something obvious, i literally just add "KEEP" to the front of the filename. takes maybe 20 minutes and then when you open premiere you're only looking at stuff that's worth cutting. the color stuff i do at the very end personally, i edit the whole thing first with a flat look and then grade when the cuts are locked. trying to color grade while you're still making decisions about which clips to use is just confusing.