Culling footage in DaVinci Resolve: the fast manual workflow

Resolve has everything you need to cull a shoot without ever leaving the Media page. Here is the fastest manual setup, and the honest math on where it stops scaling.

Set up before you review a single clip

Work on the Media page, not the Edit page. Turn on live preview so hovering the playhead across a thumbnail scrubs it, and learn the two keys that carry the whole job: JKL for shuttle and the number row for clip colors or flags. Make bins first: Selects, Safety, Rejects. The structure you create now is the only thing that keeps hour three honest.

The pass itself

1. Scrub, do not watch. Hover scrub across each thumbnail; only press play when a clip might be a keeper. Rejects should cost you two seconds each.

2. One keystroke per verdict. Flag or color-label every clip as you touch it: keeper, safety, reject. Never leave a clip unmarked; unmarked clips are what force a second full pass.

3. Smart bins do the filing. Build smart bins keyed on your flags so Selects fills itself as you work. At the end, drag Selects into a stringout timeline and you have a reviewable cut of everything worth keeping.

Where manual culling stops scaling

The workflow above is genuinely fast for a hundred clips. It collapses on volume: a wedding or a two-day shoot comes home with several hundred clips across multiple cameras, and scrubbing is still a human watching footage in compressed real time. Call it two to four seconds per reject and half a minute per candidate keeper, and a 600-clip shoot is an afternoon of pure triage before any creative work starts. It also does nothing about color: your selects are still flat log that will not match across cameras.

The hybrid: automate the triage, keep the taste

The rejection half of culling is measurable (junk, duplicates, focus and exposure failures, shot type), which means it automates. Basecut runs that triage locally on your machine: it bins keepers from junk, sorts clips by drone, gimbal, tripod or handheld, applies a per-clip baseline color correction, and hands Resolve organized bins plus a selects stringout, so you open Resolve at the step where taste starts. Culling and color are free on your own footage. See it on real footage.