okay so i just wrapped my first actual paid shoot last weekend, small commercial property for a local business owner who wanted some promotional footage. the flying part was fine, weather cooperated and i got some shots i was genuinely happy with. but then i got home and had like 40 minutes of raw footage across three batteries and i had no real system for going through it. ended up spending like four hours in premiere just scrubbing through everything trying to find the good stuff and i delivered a 90 second clip two days later than i told the client.

i know i need a better system but i dont really know what that looks like for commercial work. do you color grade everything or just selected shots? do you use proxies? how do you decide what to cut before you even import? i feel like i need to sort this out before i take on anything bigger

first thing that helped me was doing a quick cull on the sd card before i even import. i just skim through on a fast viewer and mark the obvious throwaway stuff, bad horizon, jerky movement, shots where i was repositioning, anything clearly unusable. takes maybe 20 minutes and cuts your import pile way down. then for grading i only do a full grade on the shots that make the final cut, not everything, that was a huge time sink early on. proxies are worth it if youre on a slower machine, made a huge difference for me with 4k footage

honestly the late delivery thing happens to everyone starting out and most clients are pretty understanding if you communicate. like if you had just sent a quick message saying hey im putting some extra care into the edit and need one more day, that usually lands fine. the silence is what makes people anxious. workflow wise i keep it pretty simple, i have a folder template i copy for every new job so everything has the same structure and i can find stuff without thinking about it. raw footage, selects, project file, exports, client delivery, thats basically it. nothing fancy but consistency matters more than having the perfect setup