been doing a lot more video lately and im trying to get a proper workflow going instead of just winging it every time. right now i dump footage into premiere, cut what i want, then try to color grade at the end and it always feels like im making decisions in the wrong order. like sometimes a clip looks great in the rough cut but then when i start grading i realize the exposure is totally off or whatever.

shooting in d-log on the air 3 so everything looks flat and gray until i do something with it which makes it hard to evaluate cuts before grading. do most people do a quick rough grade first just to see what theyre working with, or do you commit to the edit first and grade after? also curious if anyone has a lut workflow they actually like because ive tried a bunch of free ones and theyre all kind of garbage

I do a quick base grade first, nothing fancy just apply a LUT and maybe pull down highlights a bit so I can actually see what I have. Trying to edit flat log footage is miserable and I find I make bad decisions about which clips to use because everything looks the same shade of blah. Once the edit is locked THEN I go in and do proper per-clip grading. It adds time but the final result is way more consistent.

For LUTs honestly the ones that come with Dehancer are pretty good if you want to spend a little money, and I think Ground Control has some drone specific ones that work well with DJI log profiles. The free stuff is hit or miss but Koji Color has some decent free options buried in there.

i just slap on a random lut at like 40% opacity to get my bearings and then ignore it until the cut is done lol. probably not the right way but it works for me. the real answer is probably whatever stops you from going in circles ? i used to grade first and id spend 2 hours on a clip that ended up getting cut anyway so