How to cull wedding footage without losing your Sunday

Two cameras, a drone, maybe a gimbal B-cam: a single wedding routinely comes home as several hundred clips and a couple of terabytes. The edit is the fun part. The wall between you and it is the cull. Here is a system that gets through it fast without ever putting coverage at risk.

Rule one: culling is rejection, not selection

The fastest cullers do not look for keepers. They look for reasons to throw a clip out, and they throw it out the instant they find one. Out of focus on the subject: gone. Blown to unrecoverable white: gone. Six seconds of ground while you walked between setups: gone. A duplicate of a take you already have better: gone. You do not need to watch a clip to the end to reject it, and on the first pass you should almost never watch anything to the end.

The three-pass structure

1. The junk pass. Kill the obvious garbage: slates, accidental rolls, transit shots, hard technical failures. No creative judgment allowed; this pass is mechanical, and it usually removes a third of the volume.

2. The coverage pass. Group what survives by moment (prep, ceremony, portraits, reception) and by how it was shot (drone, gimbal, tripod, handheld). Within each group, keep the best take of each moment plus one safety. This is where duplicates die.

3. The select pass. Only now make creative calls, on the survivors, with fresh eyes. Star the hero shots the film will hang on. This pass is short because passes one and two did the volume work.

Never delete, always bin

Rejected clips go to a rejects bin, not the trash, until the film is delivered. A clip that fails as a visual still carries usable audio, can serve as a desperation cutaway, and answers the inevitable "do you have a shot of grandma during the toast" email. Storage is cheaper than a missing moment at a wedding you cannot reshoot.

Cull before you color, color before you edit

Grading rejects is wasted work, so cull first. But editing flat log footage is miserable: you cannot judge a moment through gray mush, and mixed cameras will not match. The right order is cull, then a baseline correction pass (white balance, exposure, log conversion), then edit on footage that already looks like the film.

What automation should and should not do

Passes one and two are measurable: junk, duplicates, focus and exposure failures, shot method, coverage grouping. That is exactly what Basecut automates: it analyzes every clip locally on your machine (nothing uploads, because two terabytes was never going to upload anyway), bins keepers from junk, sorts by drone, gimbal, tripod or handheld, applies a per-clip baseline correction, and hands the whole thing to DaVinci Resolve as organized bins and timelines. Pass three, the creative one, stays yours.

The 14-day trial (5 free exports, no card) lets you run a real wedding through it and judge the keepers it picks before spending anything. See it on real footage.

Want the step-by-step version with AI doing the first pass? Read How to cull wedding footage with AI, step by step and then see what each editor receives when you hand the cull over.