How to cull wedding footage with AI, step by step

A wedding comes home as hundreds of clips from two or three cameras, a drone and sometimes a phone. Culling is the job of getting that pile down to the footage worth editing, and it is the part most people put off. AI can do the first half of that job. This guide shows how, and where your own judgment still comes in.

Last checked 2026-10-10.

Every step below works with any tool or none. Where a step names Basecut, it is our product, so judge that part on your own footage. If you want the by-hand system first, read How to cull wedding footage without losing your Sunday.

What AI culling can do, and what it cannot

AI is good at questions with a measurable answer. Is this section black, frozen or silent? What kind of shot is it: drone, gimbal, tripod, handheld? What happens in it? Is someone speaking, and what do they say? A tool that watches and listens to every clip can answer those across a whole card dump while you sleep.

It cannot know your couple. It does not know that the grandmother at the back is the person the family will ask about, or that the best minute of the ceremony is the one where the officiant goes off script. So treat its output as a sorted pile with a recommendation, not as your selects. The creative pass stays yours.

Your options, honestly

Five approaches come up when wedding videographers talk about culling. They do different jobs, so the right one depends on where you are stuck.

Checked against each vendor's own pages on 2026-10-10. Features and prices change, so check the vendor before you buy. For prices, platforms and Jumper, see Best AI tools to cull wedding video footage and Basecut vs Jumper vs Wedit.

Step by step

This is the whole flow, from card dump to a project open in your editor.

1. 1. Copy the card dump to two places and cull from the copy

   Offload every card to a working drive and a backup, and check that the copies finished cleanly. Keep one folder per camera or per card, with the original file names. Culling should never touch the only copy of a wedding. Basecut reads your files where they sit, never changes the originals, and keeps its results in its own run folder.

2. 2. Write a one-line brief, then test on a small slice

   AI ranks better when it knows what the shoot is for. Write one sentence: the venue and what matters most, such as the vows, the toasts or the first dance. In Basecut this is the optional "Brief for this shoot" box on the import screen (up to 400 characters, used for that shoot only), and clips that match it rank higher. Before a large first import Basecut also shows a time estimate and offers "Try the first 10 clips", which is a cheap way to judge the picks before you commit a night to the full run.

3. 3. Run the first pass overnight

   Point the tool at the whole folder and start it before bed. Speed depends on your computer and your footage. In Basecut's own tests on a 16 GB M4 Mac, a shoot of short clips took about two hours of processing per hour of footage and a few long takes about one hour per hour, so a wedding with several hours of footage is an overnight job. Basecut Cloud, included on paid plans, is the faster option. If a run is interrupted, Basecut resumes without redoing finished clips, and you can retry any clip that failed.

4. 4. Read the results in the right order

   Do not start with the best clips. Start with the bins that can hurt you. Open Junk first and skim it: in Basecut only dead sections (black, frozen, silent or empty) and color bars or test patterns go there, so what you find should be genuinely dead footage. Then skim Skip and Maybe for moments the AI underrated. Last, play through the Hero and Keeper bins and confirm they are what you would have picked. Ten minutes here tells you how far to trust the rest.

5. 5. Fix what it got wrong

   Change the rating of any clip the AI ranked too high or too low. In Basecut you set a clip's star rating yourself, your rating wins over the AI's, and it is your rating that goes to your editor. Work from the exceptions. You only need to touch the clips you disagree with.

6. 6. Check coverage before you trust the cull

   List the moments the film cannot lose: the processional, the vows, the ring exchange, the first kiss, the toasts, the first dance. For each one, confirm that at least two angles survived and that the audio source is there. If a moment has only one angle, pull the next-best clip back in. Do not delete the rest. A rejected clip can still carry usable audio or a cutaway, and a family member may ask for a specific moment.

7. 7. Send the picks to your editor and make the creative calls there

   Open the result in the editor you cut in. In Basecut you can send everything or tick just the clips you want, and it opens in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro with bins or keyword collections, ratings and markers. What each editor receives, including color, is spelled out in its own guide. From here the work is yours: choosing the moments and building the story. That is the third pass of the three-pass cull.

Where AI culling goes wrong

• It judges what is on screen, not what matters to the family. Keep your coverage list from step 6 and check it every time.
• A quiet stretch inside a good clip lowers that section's rank in Basecut rather than sending it to Junk, but it can still land lower than you would put it. Steps 4 and 5 are there to catch that.
• Clips longer than 90 seconds are analyzed in sections, so one long ceremony take can hold both a hero moment and a skip. Look at sections, not only files.
• The first run on a new computer includes a one-time download of the on-device AI, so do not leave your first real wedding to the night before delivery.

Try it on one real wedding

The only fair test is your own card dump. Basecut has a 14-day free trial with 5 free exports and no card, enough to run one wedding through and judge the picks. See it on real footage.