so i just got back from a trip where i flew pretty much every day for two weeks and now im sitting here with like 200gb of footage across multiple cards and i genuinely have no idea where to start. ive been using premiere for a while but my project files are always chaos, clips everywhere, no real system

i know this is partly just a me problem with organization but im curious how other people actually handle it when they come back from a big shoot. do you watch everything first and rate clips before you edit, do you just dive in, do you use some kind of folder structure that actually makes sense

also slightly separate question ? does anyone do any rough edit before color grading or do you color grade the selects first. i feel like my workflow changes every time and nothing ever feels efficient

oof 200gb yeah thats a lot to come home to. i used to just dump everything into one folder and it was a nightmare. what i do now is honestly pretty simple ? i sort by location first, then by day within that, and i rename the card dumps immediately so i know which card they came from. takes maybe 20 minutes when i get home before i do anything else and it saves so much headache later

for the edit vs grade question, i always rough cut first. like get the story or the vibe of the piece together with the raw flat footage and dont touch color until im happy with the actual edit. grading before you cut means you might spend an hour on a clip you end up not using, which ive absolutely done and it hurts every time

also davinci resolve has been a gamechanger for me if you're open to switching ? the color tools are just so much better for log footage than premiere's lumetri stuff in my experience

i rate everything in lightroom actually before it even touches premiere, just to cull the garbage clips out. star ratings for keepers, rejected for anything with a bad move or exposure issue. sounds like extra steps but it means im only ever editing maybe 20-30% of what i shot which makes the whole thing way less overwhelming. the syncing between lr and pr can be finicky sometimes but once its set up its pretty solid