so anyway i finally sat down to edit the footage from a coastal shoot i did last weekend and it took me like four hours just to get through the sorting phase before i even touched anything in premiere. i had maybe 45 minutes of raw clips and i genuinely dont know how people pump out polished videos fast enough to make this sustainable if youre doing client work.

right now i dump everything into one folder, watch it all, star the stuff i like, then drag it into a sequence and kind of figure it out from there. theres got to be a better system. do you rename files on the drone or after? do people use proxy workflows for 4k stuff? my laptop struggles a bit with 4k60 in premiere so that might be part of why its slow but the organisational side feels like the bigger problem

proxies are a game changer if your machine is struggling, dont skip that step because it feels like extra work upfront ? it saves you so much frustration when the timeline actually plays back smoothly. in premiere you can right click and generate proxies automatically and then just toggle between proxy and full res when you need to export.

for organization i do date folders with a location name, then inside that i have a selects folder where i move anything that might be usable after the first pass. the stuff that definitely sucks goes into a reject folder that i dont delete until the project is delivered just in case. took a while to be disciplined about it but now i can usually get through an hour of raw footage in maybe 30-40 mins of review and i never feel like im hunting for a clip i remember shooting

honestly the thing that helped me most was just being way more ruthless during the review. like if a clip doesnt immediately make me think "yes that goes in" it goes in the reject pile. used to sit there watching mediocre footage three times trying to decide and that was the real time sink. also cutting the music first and then fitting clips to the beats sounds backwards but it forces you to be decisive about length instead of letting clips run too long