so this is kind of embarrassing but i have like 4 months of drone footage across probably 12 different SD cards and external drives and i genuinely do not know where most of it is. some of it i've imported into premiere, some into davinci resolve which i switched to halfway through, and there are definitely duplicates everywhere. everytime i want to make a video i spend like an hour just trying to find the clip i remember shooting.

anyway the organization problem aside ? curious how people actually structure their editing workflow for cinematic stuff. do you do all your color grading before you pick your clips or after? i feel like im always doing things in a weird order and then having to redo work. also does anyone actually use proxies for drone footage or is that overkill on a normal laptop

proxies are not overkill at all if your machine is struggling, i run resolve on a laptop that's a few years old and without proxies 4k footage from my air 2s is basically a slideshow. takes like 20 minutes to generate them but then editing is actually enjoyable instead of a nightmare. just remember to switch back to full res before export lol, done that twice

the organization thing is real and i dont think you should feel embarassed about it, pretty much everyone who flies casually ends up in that situation eventually. what i do now ? immediately after every session i dump everything into a folder named by date and location, just something like -03 coastline trip, and i delete obvious garbage right there on the same day while i still remember the context of what i was shooting. waiting even a week and everything starts looking the same.

for the actual edit order i do a rough selects pass first, just marking the clips i even want to consider, then i assemble a rough cut to music before i touch color at all. grading before you know if a clip is even staying in the edit feels like wasted effort to me. though i know some people do it differently and swear by it so maybe it just depends on how your brain works