so anyway ive been trying to put together a short film from a trip i did last month, about 4 days flying in iceland, and i came back with something like 340 clips. i shoot in dlog-m and i have a whole color grading thing i do and its just... taking forever. like weeks. im still not done.

the problem is i dont really have a system. i dump everything into davinci, i start coloring things, then i realize the edit isnt right, so i go back and recut, then the grades are all messed up because the clips are different now. its this horrible cycle and every time i sit down to work on it i end up just kind of staring at the timeline for 20 minutes.

i know i need to figure out a better order of operations but honestly every tutorial i watch has a different opinion on whether you should rough cut first or color first and i cant figure out what actually works in practice. what do people here actually do, like in real life not in theory

rough cut first, always, no exceptions in my experience. color grading before your edit is locked is honestly just wasted time because youre going to move stuff around and suddenly your grade is on the wrong clip or the transition doesnt match anymore. i made this mistake so many times.

what i do now: dump everything in, do a really brutal first pass where i delete anything that isnt great ? like be mean about it, you dont need 12 takes of the same waterfall. then i do a loose assembly just to see if theres a story or a flow. then i tighten it. THEN i color. the color should be the fun part at the end not the thing youre redoing over and over.

also 340 clips from 4 days is a lot, i probably wouldve culled on location every evening to keep it manageable but thats easier said than done when youre actually there

i feel this so much. i had the same problem with a road trip video last year and it sat half finished on my hard drive for like 6 months because i kept getting stuck. what finally got me through it was just setting a hard limit on the final length before i even started editing ? like ok this video is going to be exactly 3 minutes, and working backwards from that. forces you to make decisions instead of agonizing over every clip. might not work for everyone but it unstuck me pretty fast